Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Efficacy and safety of Eucerin 10% Urea Lotion in the treatment of symptoms of aged skin

Two features of senescent skin are dryness and itching, which are caused by a reduced water-binding capacity of the stratum corneum. Urea, topically applied, is known to increase the water content of the stratum corneum and thereby improves the symptoms of dry and itching skin. The aim of the study was to compare the efficacy and safety of a lotion containing 10% urea (Eucerin® 10% Urea Lotion) with that of the urea-free lotion base in the treatment of the symptoms of aged skin. In a randomized double-blind vehicle-controlled study with a semilateral design, 60 elderly volunteers (mean age 64.1 years) with characteristic symptoms of aged but otherwise healthy skin were treated over a period of 4 weeks. The study protocol used surface moisture content of the forearm skin as determined by corneometry as the primary efficacy criterion and subjective symptoms (dryness, itching) as secondary efficacy criteria. Eucerin 10% Urea Lotion proved to be superior to its vehicle in increasing skin hydration, as shown b.
Dissecting cancer heterogeneity based on dimension reduction of transcriptomic profiles using extreme learning machines

It is becoming increasingly clear that major malignancies such as breast, colorectal and gastric cancers are not single disease entities, but comprising multiple cancer subtypes of distinct molecular properties. Molecular subtyping has been widely used to dissect inter-tumor biological heterogeneity, in relation to clinical outcomes. A key step of this methodology is to perform unsupervised classification of gene expression profiles, which, however, often suffers challenges of high-dimensionality, feature redundancy as well as noise and irrelevant information. To overcome these limitations, we propose ELM-CC, which employs hidden observation features obtained from extreme learning machines (ELMs) for cancer classification. To demonstrate the effectiveness and usefulness, we applied ELM-CC for gastric and ovarian cancer subtyping. Comparing with the widely-used consensus clustering method, our approach demonstrated much better clustering performance and identified molecular subtypes that are much more clinically relevant.
THE ROLE OF ANTIGENS AND HLA CLASS I HAPLOTYPES IN INDIGENOUS WOMEN IN TASHKENT WITH HYSTEROMYOMA

From a clinical point of view, many researchers identify a number of risk factors that contribute to the emergence hysteromyoma: profuse menstruation, late menarche, frequent abortions, inflammatory diseases of the uterus and appendages, the presence of TORCH infections dishormonal breast diseases and disorders of thyroid function. It is noted also the role of hereditary factors to the disease. The hereditary predisposition is multifactorial in the nature. Thus, the risk of developing fibroids is 4 times higher in women with a burdened heredity of this pathology. When the disease is at a young age the hereditary is much higher. 17.5% cases of oncological diseases in genital sphere and other organs (endometrial, cervical, ovarian, breast, etc.) occur in this category of women (Egorova et al., 2007; Kazubskaya et al., 2007; Lanchinsky et al., 2004).
Impact of the 2013 National Rollout of CMS Competitive Bidding Program: The Disruption Continues

OBJECTIVE Use of glucose monitoring is essential to the safety of individuals with insulin-treated diabetes. In 2011, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) implemented the Medicare Competitive Bidding Program (CBP) in nine test markets. This resulted in a substantial disruption of beneficiary access to self-monitoring of blood glucose (SMBG) supplies and significant increases in the percentage of beneficiaries with either reduced or no acquisition of supplies. These reductions were significantly associated with increased mortality, hospitalizations, and costs. The CBP was implemented nationally in July 2013. We evaluated the impact of this rollout to determine if the adverse outcomes seen in 2011 persisted. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS This longitudinal study followed 529,627 insulin-treated beneficiaries from 2009 through 2013 to assess changes in beneficiary acquisition of testing supplies in the initial nine test markets (TEST, n = 43,939) and beneficiaries not affected by the 2011 rollout (NONTEST, n = 485,688). All Medicare beneficiary records for analysis were obtained from CMS. RESULTS The percentages of beneficiaries with partial/no SMBG acquisition were significantly higher in both the TEST (37.4%) and NONTEST (37.6%) groups after the first 6 months of the national CBP rollout, showing increases of 48.1% and 60.0%, respectively (both P < 0.0001). The percentage of beneficiaries with no record for SMBG acquisition increased from 54.1% in January 2013 to 62.5% by December 2013. CONCLUSIONS Disruption of beneficiary access to their prescribed SMBG supplies has persisted and worsened. Diabetes testing supplies should be excluded from the CBP until transparent, science-based methodologies for safety monitoring are adopted and implemented.
Wireless Sensor Network Design for Transmission Line Monitoring, Metering, and Controlling: Introducing Broadband over Power Lines-Enhanced Network Model (BPLeNM)

This paper introduces the broadband over power lines-enhanced network model (BPLeNM) that is suitable for efficiently delivering the generated data of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) of overhead high-voltage (HV) power grids to the substations. BPLeNM exploits the high data rates of the already installed BPL networks across overhead HV grids. BPLeNM is compared against other two well-verified network models from the relevant literature: the linear network model (LNM) and the optimal arrangement network model (OANM). The contribution of this paper is threefold. First, the general mathematical framework that is necessary for describing WSNs of overhead HV grids is first presented. In detail, the general mathematical formulation of BPLeNM is proposed while the existing formulations of LNM and OANM are extended so as to deal with the general case of overhead HV grids. Based on these general mathematical formulations, the general expression of maximum delay time of the WSN data is determined for the three network models. Second, the three network models are studied and assessed for a plethora of case scenarios. Through these case scenarios, the impact of different lengths of overhead HV grids, different network arrangements, new communications technologies, variation of WSN density across overhead HV grids, and changes of generated WSN data rate on the maximum delay time is thoroughly examined. Third, to assess the performance and the feasibility of the previous network models, the feasibility probability (FP) is proposed. FP is a macroscopic metric that estimates how much practical and economically feasible is the selection of one of the previous three network models. The main conclusion of this paper is that BPLeNM defines a powerful, convenient, and schedulable network model for today’s and future’s overhead HV grids in the smart grid (SG) landscape.
Surface properties of dental zirconia ceramics affected by ultrasonic scaling and low-temperature degradation

Zirconia (3Y-TZP) dental prostheses are widely used in clinical dentistry. However, the effect of ultrasonic scaling performed as a part of professional tooth cleaning on 3Y-TZP dental prostheses, especially in conjunction with low-temperature degradation (LTD), has not been fully investigated. The present study aimed to evaluate the influence of ultrasonic scaling and LTD on the surface properties of 3Y-TZP in relation to bacterial adhesion on the treated surface. 3Y-TZP specimens (4 × 4 × 2 mm) were polished and then subjected to autoclaving at 134°C for 100 h to induce LTD, followed by 10 rounds of ultrasonic scaling using a steel scaler tip for 1 min each. Surface roughness, crystalline structure, wettability, and hardness were analyzed by optical interferometry, X-ray diffraction analysis, contact angle measurement, and nano-indentation technique, respectively. Subsequently, bacterial adhesion onto the treated 3Y-TZP surface was evaluated using Streptococcus mitis and S. oralis. The results demonstrated that the combination of ultrasonic scaling and LTD significantly increased the Sa value (surface roughness parameter) of the polished 3Y-TZP surface from 1.6 nm to 117 nm. LTD affected the crystalline structure, causing phase transformation from the tetragonal to the monoclinic phase, and decreased both the contact angle and surface hardness. However, bacterial adhesion was not influenced by these changes in surface properties. The present study suggests that ultrasonic scaling may be acceptable for debridement of 3Y-TZP dental prostheses because it did not facilitate bacterial adhesion even in the combination with LTD, although it did cause slight roughening of the surface.
Twelve-Week 24/7 Ambulatory Artificial Pancreas With Weekly Adaptation of Insulin Delivery Settings: Effect on Hemoglobin A1c and Hypoglycemia

OBJECTIVE Artificial pancreas (AP) systems are best positioned for optimal treatment of type 1 diabetes (T1D) and are currently being tested in outpatient clinical trials. Our consortium developed and tested a novel adaptive AP in an outpatient, single-arm, uncontrolled multicenter clinical trial lasting 12 weeks. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS Thirty adults with T1D completed a continuous glucose monitor (CGM)-augmented 1-week sensor-augmented pump (SAP) period. After the AP was started, basal insulin delivery settings used by the AP for initialization were adapted weekly, and carbohydrate ratios were adapted every 4 weeks by an algorithm running on a cloud-based server, with automatic data upload from devices. Adaptations were reviewed by expert study clinicians and patients. The primary end point was change in hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c). Outcomes are reported adhering to consensus recommendations on reporting of AP trials. RESULTS Twenty-nine patients completed the trial. HbA1c, 7.0 ± 0.8% at the start of AP use, improved to 6.7 ± 0.6% after 12 weeks (−0.3, 95% CI −0.5 to −0.2, P < 0.001). Compared with the SAP run-in, CGM time spent in the hypoglycemic range improved during the day from 5.0 to 1.9% (−3.1, 95% CI −4.1 to −2.1, P < 0.001) and overnight from 4.1 to 1.1% (−3.1, 95% CI −4.2 to −1.9, P < 0.001). Whereas carbohydrate ratios were adapted to a larger extent initially with minimal changes thereafter, basal insulin was adapted throughout. Approximately 10% of adaptation recommendations were manually overridden. There were no protocol-related serious adverse events. CONCLUSIONS Use of our novel adaptive AP yielded significant reductions in HbA1c and hypoglycemia.
An Enhanced Region Proposal Network for object detection using deep learning method

Faster Region-based Convolutional Network (Faster R-CNN) is a state-of-the-art object detection method. However, the object detection effect of Faster R-CNN is not good based on the Region Proposal Network (RPN). Inspired by RPN of Faster R-CNN, we propose a novel proposal generation method called Enhanced Region Proposal Network (ERPN). Four improvements are presented in ERPN. Firstly, our proposed deconvolutional feature pyramid network (DFPN) is introduced to improve the quality of region proposals. Secondly, novel anchor boxes are designed with interspersed scales and adaptive aspect ratios. Thereafter, the capability of object localization is increased. Thirdly, a particle swarm optimization (PSO) based support vector machine (SVM), termed PSO-SVM, is developed to distinguish the positive and negative anchor boxes. Fourthly, the classification part of multi-task loss function in RPN is improved. Consequently, the effect of classification loss is strengthened. In this study, our proposed ERPN is compared with five object detection methods on both PASCAL VOC and COCO data sets. For the VGG-16 model, our ERPN obtains 78.6% mAP on VOC 2007 data set, 74.4% mAP on VOC 2012 data set and 31.7% on COCO data set. The performance of ERPN is the best among the comparison object detection methods. Furthermore, the detection speed of ERPN is 5.8 fps. Additionally, ERPN obtains good effect on small object detection.
Does it matter which platelet-rich plasma we use?

Summary Several commercial devices are available to the equine practitioner for preparation of platelet-rich plasma (PRP). PRP is a ‘catch all’ term for a multitude of platelet concentrates (PC) with different biological components and properties. Case reports often fail to cite the exact type of PC used. A critical analysis of the available evidence on the clinical significance of differences between platelet concentrates is presented in an attempt to determine if one commercially available product is superior to the others.
Mental health problems in health professionals

Introduction: For the vast majority of nurses and doctors, the choice of their profession, represents a successful career, even though this isn’t a fact for everyone. For some of them reflects a journey into despair. A significant number of doctors and nurses, suffers from serious mental illness.Materials and Methods: It is conducted literature review of published journals from scientific databases such as Medline, Pub Med, Scholar Google, for the period 1985-2010, using keywords and combination of them: "health professionals", "psychiatric morbidity", "effects of stress on mental health "," mental disorders " Literature Review: There are researches in population health professionals, more often to doctors and nurses / only three, referred to mental illnesses mainly burnout, depression, anxiety disorders, alcoholism, and suicide and the effect thereof on the quality of life. Total of 215 studies were found and 48 of the were reviewed for this study.Conclusions: It is obvious from the literature, that mental health problems of the health professionals are not treated promptly or with the appropriate efficiency. The reasons associated with the stigma of mental illness by illness, the subsequent denial, the misconceived professional solidarity, culture of "
Age dependent normative data of vertical and horizontal reflexive saccades

Purpose There is some controversy whether or not saccades change with age. This cross-sectional study aims to clarify the characteristics of reflexive saccades at various ages to establish a normative cohort in a standardized set-up. Second objective is to investigate the feasibility of saccadometry in daily ophthalmological practice. Methods One hundred healthy participants aged between 6 and 76 years underwent an ophthalmologic examination and saccadometry, using an infrared video-oculography device, sampling at 220 Hz. The reflexive saccades were evoked in four directions and three target displacements each (5°/15°/30° horizontally and of 5°/10°/20° vertically). Saccadic peak velocity, gain (amplitude/target displacement) and latency were measured. Results Mean peak velocity of saccades was 213°/s (± 29°/s), 352°/s (± 50°/s) and 455°/s (± 67°/s) to a target position 5°, 15°and 30° horizontally, respectively, and 208°/s (± 36°/s), 303°/s (± 50°/s) and 391°/s (± 71°/s) to a target position 5°, 10° and 20° vertically. The association between peak velocity and eccentricity proved to be present at any age in all four directions. We found no relevant effect of age on peak velocity, gain and latency in a fitted linear mixed model. However, latency becomes shorter during childhood and adolescence, while in adulthood it is relatively stable with a slight trend to increase in the elderly. Saccades are more precise when the target displacement is small. Isometric saccades are most common, followed by hypometric ones. All children and elderly were able to perform good quality saccadometry in a recording time of approximately 10 minutes. Conclusion The presented data may serve as normative control for further studies using such a video-oculography device for saccadometry. The means of peak velocity and the gain can be used independently from age respecting the target displacement. Latency is susceptible to age.
Neutrophil gelatinase-associated lipocalcin (NGAL) as a biomarker of dialysis-dependent acute kidney injury following infrarenal aortic surgery

Acute kidney injury (AKI) is common following abdominal aortic surgery. NGAL might be useful in the early diagnosis of AKI since it responds rapidly to ischaemic damage. Methods: Twenty patients undergoing elective infrarenal aortic surgery. U-NGAL was measured before surgery and 24, 48 and 72 hours postoperatively. Results: No significant rise in U-NGAL was seen in patients without AKI at any time. All patients who developed dialysis- dependent AKI had a significant increase in U-NGAL. Conclusion: U-NGAL did not increase solely in response to the surgical trauma. U-NGAL may be a useful biomarker for AKI following abdominal aortic surgery.
Meat Cooking Methods and Risk of Type 2 Diabetes: Results From Three Prospective Cohort Studies

OBJECTIVE To examine open-flame and/or high-temperature cooking (grilling/barbecuing, broiling, or roasting) and doneness preferences (rare, medium, or well done) for red meat, chicken, and fish in relation to type 2 diabetes (T2D) risk among U.S. adults who consumed animal flesh regularly (≥2 servings/week). RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS The prospective studies included 52,752 women from the Nurses’ Health Study (NHS) (followed during 1996–2012), 60,809 women from NHS II (followed during 2001–2013), and 24,679 men from the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study (HPFS) (followed during 1996–2012) who were free of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer at baseline. Incident cases of T2D were confirmed by validated supplementary questionnaires. RESULTS We documented 7,895 incident cases of T2D during 1.74 million person-years of follow-up. After multivariate adjustments including baseline BMI and total consumption of red meat, chicken, and fish, higher frequency of open-flame and/or high-temperature cooking was independently associated with an elevated T2D risk. When comparing open-flame and/or high-temperature cooking >15 times/month with <4 times/month, the pooled hazard ratio (HR) (95% CI) of T2D was 1.28 (1.18, 1.39; Ptrend <0.001). When comparing the extreme quartiles of doneness-weighted frequency of high-temperature cooking, the pooled HR (95% CI) of T2D was 1.20 (1.12, 1.28; Ptrend <0.001). These associations remained significant when red meat and chicken were examined separately. In addition, estimated intake of heterocyclic aromatic amines was also associated with an increased T2D risk. CONCLUSIONS Independent of consumption amount, open-flame and/or high-temperature cooking for both red meat and chicken is associated with an increased T2D risk among adults who consume animal flesh regularly.
Risk of Infection in Type 1 and Type 2 Diabetes Compared With the General Population: A Matched Cohort Study

OBJECTIVE We describe in detail the burden of infections in adults with diabetes within a large national population cohort. We also compare infection rates between patients with type 1 and type 2 diabetes mellitus (T1DM and T2DM). RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS A retrospective cohort study compared 102,493 English primary care patients aged 40–89 years with a diabetes diagnosis by 2008 (n = 5,863 T1DM and n = 96,630 T2DM) with 203,518 age-sex-practice–matched control subjects without diabetes. Infection rates during 2008–2015, compiled from primary care and linked hospital and mortality records, were compared across 19 individual infection categories. These were further summarized as any requiring a prescription or hospitalization or as cause of death. Poisson regression was used to estimate incidence rate ratios (IRRs) between 1) people with diabetes and control subjects and 2) T1DM and T2DM adjusted for age, sex, smoking, BMI, and deprivation. RESULTS Compared with control subjects without diabetes, patients with diabetes had higher rates for all infections, with the highest IRRs seen for bone and joint infections, sepsis, and cellulitis. IRRs for infection-related hospitalizations were 3.71 (95% CI 3.27–4.21) for T1DM and 1.88 (95% CI 1.83–1.92) for T2DM. A direct comparison of types confirmed higher adjusted risks for T1DM versus T2DM (death from infection IRR 2.19 [95% CI 1.75–2.74]). We estimate that 6% of infection-related hospitalizations and 12% of infection-related deaths were attributable to diabetes. CONCLUSIONS People with diabetes, particularly T1DM, are at increased risk of serious infection, representing an important population burden. Strategies that reduce the risk of developing severe infections and poor treatment outcomes are under-researched and should be explored.
Technical-efficiency analysis of end-of-life care in long-term care facilities within Europe: A cross-sectional study of deceased residents in 6 EU countries (PACE)

Background An ageing population in the EU leads to a higher need of long-term institutional care at the end of life. At the same time, healthcare costs rise while resources remain limited. Consequently, an urgency to extend our knowledge on factors affecting efficiency of long-term care facilities (LTCFs) arises. This study aims to investigate and explain variation in technical efficiency of end-of-life care within and between LTCFs of six EU countries: Belgium (Flanders), England, Finland, Italy, the Netherlands and Poland. In this study, technical efficiency reflects the LTCFs’ ability to obtain maximal quality of life (QoL) and quality of dying (QoD) for residents from a given set of resource inputs (personnel and capacity). Methods Cross-sectional data were collected by means of questionnaires on deceased residents identified by LTCFs over a three-month period. An output-oriented data-envelopment analysis (DEA) was performed, producing efficiency scores, incorporating personnel and capacity as input and QoL and QoD as output. Scenario analysis was conducted. Regression analysis was performed on explanatory (country, LTCF type, ownership, availability of palliative care and opioids) and case mix (disease severity) variables. Results 133 LTCFs of only one type (onsite nurses and offsite GPs) were considered in order to reduce heterogeneity. Variation in LTCF efficiency was found across as well as within countries. This variation was not explained by country, ownership, availability of palliative care or opioids. However, in the ‘hands-on care at the bedside’ scenario, i.e. only taking into account nursing and care assistants as input, Poland (p = 0.00) and Finland (p = 0.04) seemed to be most efficient. Conclusions Efficiency of LTCFs differed extensively across as well as within countries, indicating room for considerable efficiency improvement. Our findings should be interpreted cautiously, as comprehensive comparative EU-wide research is challenging as it is influenced by many factors.