Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Characteristics of research-focused human islet preparations from organ donors with type 2 diabetes

ABSTRACT Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2D) affects 463 million individuals worldwide. β-cell dysfunction and relatively inadequate β-cell mass has been implicated in the pathogenesis of T2D. Primary human islets from T2D patients can reveal the islet dysfunction and the underlying mechanisms and thus have become valued resources for diabetes research. Our center (Human Islet Resource Center, China) has prepared a number of batches of human islets from T2D organ donors. The present study aims to characterize islet isolation processes, islet yields, and qualities of T2D pancreases by comparing with non-diabetic (ND) ones. Overall, 24 T2D and 80 ND pancreases were obtained with informed research consents. The digestion time, islet purity, yield, size distribution, islet morphology score, viability, and function in each islet preparation were analyzed. We found that at digestion stage, T2D pancreases need significantly longer digestion duration and have worse digestion rates and lower gross islet yields. At purification stage, T2D pancreases have poorer purity, purification rate, morphology score, and islet yields after purification. Functional evaluation by GSI assay showed that the human T2D islets have significantly lower glucose stimulated insulin secretion ability. In conclusion, the features of longer digestion duration, lower yields and quality, and impaired insulin secretion in T2D group are consistent with the pathological condition of this disease. Both islet yields and islet function evaluation results did not support human T2D islets as clinical transplantation resources. However, they could serve as good research models for T2D disease studies and promote the advancement of diabetes research. GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT
Pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic drug display and simulation systems in anesthesia practice

Purpose of review This review explores the use of tools and displays based on pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic (PK/PD) modelling of drugs used in anesthesia. The primary focus is on those tools designed to illustrate the interactions between two or more drugs, or classes of drugs, and in particular, their use in a real-time clinical support role. Off-line, educational tools are also explored. Recent findings Despite initial promise and encouraging supporting data, the use of real-time display of PK/PD is not common except in target-controlled infusion (TCI) pumps. Summary PK/PD simulation is a useful tool for exposition of the relationship between drug dosing and effect. The initial promise of real-time tools has yet to be realized in routine clinical practice.
The rise of hyperabundant native generalists threatens both humans and nature

In many disturbed terrestrial landscapes, a subset of native generalist vertebrates thrives. The population trends of these disturbance‐tolerant species may be driven by multiple factors, including habitat preferences, foraging opportunities (including crop raiding or human refuse), lower mortality when their predators are persecuted (the ‘human shield’ effect) and reduced competition due to declines of disturbance‐sensitive species. A pronounced elevation in the abundance of disturbance‐tolerant wildlife can drive numerous cascading impacts on food webs, biodiversity, vegetation structure and people in coupled human–natural systems. There is also concern for increased risk of zoonotic disease transfer to humans and domestic animals from wildlife species with high pathogen loads as their abundance and proximity to humans increases. Here we use field data from 58 landscapes to document a supra‐regional phenomenon of the hyperabundance and community dominance of Southeast Asian wild pigs and macaques. These two groups were chosen as prime candidates capable of reaching hyperabundance as they are edge adapted, with gregarious social structure, omnivorous diets, rapid reproduction and high tolerance to human proximity. Compared to intact interior forests, population densities in degraded forests were 148% and 87% higher for wild boar and macaques, respectively. In landscapes with >60% oil palm coverage, wild boar and pig‐tailed macaque estimated abundances were 337% and 447% higher than landscapes with <1% oil palm coverage, respectively, suggesting marked demographic benefits accrued by crop raiding on calorie‐rich food subsidies. There was extreme community dominance in forest landscapes with >20% oil palm cover where two pig and two macaque species accounted for >80% of independent camera trap detections, leaving <20% for the other 85 mammal species >1 kg considered. Establishing the population trends of pigs and macaques is imperative since they are linked to cascading impacts on the fauna and flora of local forest ecosystems, disease and human health, and economics (i.e., crop losses). The severity of potential negative cascading effects may motivate control efforts to achieve ecosystem integrity, human health and conservation objectives. Our review concludes that the rise of native generalists can be mediated by specific types of degradation, which influences the ecology and conservation of natural areas, creating both positive and detrimental impacts on intact ecosystems and human society.
Frequency and Referral Patterns of Neural Antibody Studies During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Objective To determine whether the frequency of paraneoplastic or autoimmune encephalitis antibodies examined in a referral center changed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods The number of patients who tested positive for neuronal or glial (neural) antibodies during pre–COVID-19 (2017–2019) and COVID-19 (2020–2021) periods was compared. The techniques used for antibody testing did not change during these periods and included a comprehensive evaluation of cell-surface and intracellular neural antibodies. The chi-square test, Spearman correlation, and Python programming language v3 were used for statistical analysis. Results Serum or CSF from 15,390 patients with suspected autoimmune or paraneoplastic encephalitis was examined. The overall positivity rate for antibodies against neural-surface antigens was similar in the prepandemic and pandemic periods (neuronal 3.2% vs 3.5%; glial 6.1 vs 5.2) with a mild single-disease increase in the pandemic period (anti-NMDAR encephalitis). By contrast, the positivity rate for antibodies against intracellular antigens was significantly increased during the pandemic period (2.8% vs 3.9%, p = 0.01), particularly Hu and GFAP. Discussion Our findings do not support that the COVID-19 pandemic led to a substantial increase of known or novel encephalitis mediated by antibodies against neural-surface antigens. The increase in Hu and GFAP antibodies likely reflects the progressive increased recognition of the corresponding disorders.
Synthesis and characterisation of a novel poly(2‐hydroxyethylmethacrylate)‐chitosan hydrogels loaded cerium oxide nanocomposites dressing on cutaneous wound healing on nursing care of chronic wound

Abstract This study was designed to establish the composition of wound dressing based on poly(2‐hydroxyethylmethacrylate)‐chitosan (PHEM‐CS) hydrogels‐loaded cerium oxide nanoparticle (CeONPs) composites for cutaneous wound healing on nursing care of the chronic wound. The as‐synthesised PHEM‐CS/CeONPs hydrogels nanocomposites were characterised by using UV–visible spectroscopy, scanning electron microscopy, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, X‐ray diffraction, and thermo gravimetric analysis. The influence of PHEM‐CS/CeONPs hydrogels nanocomposites on the gelation time, swelling ratio, in vitro degradation, and mechanical properties was investigated. The as‐prepared PHEM‐CS/CeONPs hydrogels nanocomposites dressing shows high antimicrobial activity against Staphylococcus aureus and Escherichia coli. Similar trends were observed for the treatment of biofilms where PHEM‐CS/CeONPs hydrogels nanocomposites displayed better efficiency. Furthermore, the biological properties of PHEM‐CS/CeONPs hydrogels nanocomposites had non‐toxic in cell viability and excellent cell adhesion behaviour. After 2 weeks, the wounds treated with the PHEM‐CS/CeONPs hydrogels nanocomposite wound dressing achieved a significant closure to 98.5 ± 4.95% compared with the PHEM‐CS hydrogels with nearly 71 ± 3.55% of wound closure. Hence, this study strongly supports the possibility of using this novel PHEM‐CS/CeONPs hydrogels nanocomposites wound dressing for efficient cutaneous wound healing on chronic wound infection and nursing care.
Causal Inference without Ignorability: Identification with Nonrandom Assignment and Missing Treatment Data

How a treatment causes a particular outcome is a focus of inquiry in political science. When treatment data are either nonrandomly assigned or missing, the analyst will often invoke ignorability assumptions: that is, both the treatment and missingness are assumed to be as if randomly assigned, perhaps conditional on a set of observed covariates. But what if these assumptions are wrong? What if the analyst does not know why—or even if—a particular subject received a treatment? Building on Manski, Molinari offers an approach for calculating nonparametric identification bounds for the average treatment effect of a binary treatment under general missingness or nonrandom assignment. To make these bounds substantively more informative, Molinari's technique permits adding monotonicity assumptions (e.g., assuming that treatment effects are weakly positive). Given the potential importance of these assumptions, we develop a new Bayesian method for performing sensitivity analysis regarding them. This sensitivity analysis allows analysts to interpret the assumptions' consequences quantitatively and visually. We apply this method to two problems in political science, highlighting the method's utility for applied research.
A double‐robust test for high‐dimensional gene coexpression networks conditioning on clinical information

It has been increasingly appealing to evaluate whether expression levels of two genes in a gene coexpression network are still dependent given samples' clinical information, in which the conditional independence test plays an essential role. For enhanced robustness regarding model assumptions, we propose a class of double‐robust tests for evaluating the dependence of bivariate outcomes after controlling for known clinical information. Although the proposed test relies on the marginal density functions of bivariate outcomes given clinical information, the test remains valid as long as one of the density functions is correctly specified. Because of the closed‐form variance formula, the proposed test procedure enjoys computational efficiency without requiring a resampling procedure or tuning parameters. We acknowledge the need to infer the conditional independence network with high‐dimensional gene expressions, and further develop a procedure for multiple testing by controlling the false discovery rate. Numerical results show that our method accurately controls both the type‐I error and false discovery rate, and it provides certain levels of robustness regarding model misspecification. We apply the method to a gastric cancer study with gene expression data to understand the associations between genes belonging to the transforming growth factor β signaling pathway given cancer‐stage information.
The Reality of the Situation: A Survey of Situated Analytics

The advent of low-cost, accessible, and high-performance augmented reality (AR) has shed light on a situated form of analytics where in-situ visualizations embedded in the real world can facilitate sensemaking based on the user's physical location. In this work, we identify prior literature in this emerging field with a focus on the technologies enabling such situated analytics. After collecting 47 relevant situated analytics systems, we classify them using a taxonomy of three dimensions: situating triggers, view situatedness, and data depiction. We then identify four archetypical patterns in our classification using an ensemble cluster analysis. Finally, we discuss several insights and design guidelines that we learned from our analysis.
Clinical and epidemiological risk factors for infantile hemangioma: A case‐control study

There is limited data on risk‐factors of infantile hemangioma (IH) in African and Arab countries. One hundred thirty‐two patients with IH were enrolled and compared to 282 healthy controls. Female sex (odds ratios [OR]: 2.2; 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.4–3.6), low birth weight (OR: 4.5; 95% CI 1.9–10.6), and progesterone intake (OR: 38.6; 95% CI 5–296) were the only independent risk factors identified for development of IH, while no associations were found multiple gestation and preeclampsia.
Association of matrix metalloproteinase‐2 gene variants with diabetic nephropathy risk

Diabetic nephropathy is a highly destructive microvascular complication of diabetes. Genetic predisposition is involved in the pathogenesis of diabetic nephropathy, with multiple allelic polymorphisms associated with the development and progression of the disease, thereby increasing the overall risk. To date, no study is available that shows the association of matrix metalloproteinase‐2 (MMP‐2) gene polymorphisms with diabetic nephropathy risk. Thus, we investigated the potential genetic influence of MMP‐2 promoter variants in the development of diabetic nephropathy in type 2 diabetic patients.
Global research trends on immunotherapy in cancer: A bibliometric analysis

ABSTRACT Cancer immunotherapy has been gradually introduced and has undergone noteworthy developments in recent years. The number of scientific publications has been expanding, and the progression in this field has been rapidly evolving with time. This study aimed to use bibliometric analysis to examine the past 20 years of research on cancer immunotherapy and identify future hotspots. A literature search for medical publications on immunotherapy in cancer from 2000 to 2021 was conducted in the Web of Science Core Collection on March 1, 2022. Visualization analysis was performed using VOSviewer software (version 1.6.16). From 2000 to 2021, a total of 18,778 publications were retrieved. Annual publication output grew rapidly from 366 in 2000 to 3,194 in 2021. The USA issued the largest number of publications (n = 6,739, 35.89%), with the University of Texas System making the largest contribution (n = 802, 4.27%). A total of 976 meaningful topics were identified and further classified into 4 different clusters (immune mechanism, cancer biology, immunotherapy and clinical trials). The most common research topics included ‘expression’, ‘chemotherapy’, ‘dendritic cells’, ‘pembrolizumab’ and ‘open-label’. Highly identified cancer types included hepatocellular, bladder, breast and lung cancer. A shift in popularity from mechanism research to clinical trials was observed, indicating that clinical application would be the center of attention in the future. Attention has been given to the field of cancer immunotherapy, and this trend will continue in the future. This study provides an unbiased visualization analysis on this topic in a scale-efficient manner for further research.
Polymorphs of Tolfenamic Acids: Stability Analysis Using Cluster Method

We report results of the relative stability between form I and form II of tolfenamic acid. By performing systematic cluster calculations at the B3LYP/6-31 level of theory and including the corrections to the dispersion and basis set superposition error, we found that form II is energetically more stable than form I. Furthermore, we found that the formation of dimers has a stabilizing effect compared to individual monomers in the clusters that we have considered.
Leishmania major drives host phagocyte death and cell-to-cell transfer depending on intracellular pathogen proliferation rate

The virulence of intracellular pathogens relies largely on the ability to survive and replicate within phagocytes but also on release and transfer into new host cells. Such cell-to-cell transfer could represent a target for counteracting microbial pathogenesis. However, our understanding of the underlying cellular and molecular processes remains woefully insufficient. Using intravital 2-photon microscopy of caspase-3 activation in the Leishmania major–infected (L. major–infected) live skin, we showed increased apoptosis in cells infected by the parasite. Also, transfer of the parasite to new host cells occurred directly without a detectable extracellular state and was associated with concomitant uptake of cellular material from the original host cell. These in vivo findings were fully recapitulated in infections of isolated human phagocytes. Furthermore, we observed that high pathogen proliferation increased cell death in infected cells, and long-term residency within an infected host cell was only possible for slowly proliferating parasites. Our results therefore suggest that L. major drives its own dissemination to new phagocytes by inducing host cell death in a proliferation-dependent manner.
Development and Preliminary Validity Study of a Modified Version of the Upper Extremity Fugl-Meyer Assessment for Use in Telerehabilitation

Background/Purpose: The Upper Extremity Fugl-Meyer Assessment (UEFMA, maximum 66) is widely used in clinics and research studies to examine poststroke upper extremity (UE) impairment. This study aimed to develop and provide pilot data to support the validity of a remote version of the UEFMA to examine UE impairment after stroke through telerehabilitation. Methods: Team members developed a remote version of the UEFMA for telerehabilitation (tUEFMA, maximum 44) using subscales II to IV and VII of the UEFMA. Twenty-two participants with moderate to severe arm impairment (UEFMA, median = 19) and chronic stroke (>1 year post) were evaluated using the UEFMA (face-to-face) and the tUEFMA (remotely). A prediction equation was used to identify the function to predict the UEFMA based on the tUEFMA. Intraclass correlation (ICC) was used to test the absolute agreement between the subscales included in the UEFMA and the tUEFMA, and between their 2 normalized total scores. Results: A strong and significant agreement was found between the total scores of the UEFMA and the projected value based on the tUEFMA (ICC = 0.79, P < 0.05). The ICC test also reported a good agreement in subscales II to IV and a poor agreement in subscale VII between the UEFMA and the tUEFMA using a real-time video link. Discussion and Conclusions: The study findings suggest that the tUEFMA is a promising tool to remotely examine UE impairment in individuals with chronic stroke and moderate to severe arm impairment. Future research should evaluate additional psychometric properties and clinical utility of the tUEFMA across stroke participants with a broad range of arm impairments. Video Abstract available for more insights from the authors (see the Video, Supplemental Digital Content 1, available at: http://links.lww.com/JNPT/A441).
CLUSTERINg Circulating Histones in Sepsis

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Whole Genome Sequence of Lactiplantibacillus plantarum HOM3204 and Its Antioxidant Effect on D-Galactose-Induced Aging in Mice

Lactiplantibacillus plantarum, previously named Lactobacillus plantarum, is a facultative, homofermentative lactic acid bacterium widely distributed in nature. Several Lpb. plantarum strains have been demonstrated to possess good probiotic properties, and Lpb. plantarum HOM3204 is a potential probiotic strain isolated from homemade pickled cabbage plants. In this study, whole-genome sequencing was performed to acquire genetic information and predict the function of HOM3204, which has a circular chromosome of 3,232,697 bp and two plasmids of 48,573 and 17,060 bp, respectively. Moreover, various oxidative stress-related genes were identified in the strain, and its antioxidant activity was evaluated in vitro and in vivo. Compared to reference strains, the intracellular cell-free extracts of Lpb. plantarum HOM3204 at a dose of 1010 colony-forming units (CFU)/ml in vitro exhibited stronger antioxidant properties, such as total antioxidant activity, 2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl radical scavenging rate, superoxide dismutase activity, and glutathione (GSH) content. Daily administration of 109 CFU Lpb. plantarum HOM3204 for 45 days significantly improved the antioxidant function by increasing the glutathione peroxidase activity in the whole blood and GSH concentration in the livers of D-galactose-induced aging mice. These results suggest that Lpb. plantarum HOM3204 can potentially be used as a food ingredient with good antioxidant properties.
Complete heart block of multifactorial aetiology following sugammadex administration

Sugammadex-induced bradycardia is well known and the incidence is quoted to be around 0.6–1%. 1,2 While the mechanism is unknown, sugammadex-induced bradycardia can be resistant to the administration of anti-cholinergics 3 and may degenerate to pulseless electrical activity 4 or asystole, 5 warranting management with vasopressors and inotropes alongside standard cardio-pulmonary resuscitation (CPR) measures. We report a patient who developed asystole immediately after administration of 200 mg (2.7 mg/kg) of sugammadex, which then evolved into complete heart block (CHB) requiring temporary transvenous pacing over 24 h. An 84-year-old male weighing 73 kg with features of acute acalculous cholecystitis was scheduled for an emergency laparoscopic cholecystectomy. Significant past medical history included hypertension, hypercho-lesterolaemia, ischaemic heart disease with moderate systolic dysfunction (ejection fraction 37%), stable angina and chronic kidney disease with an estimated glomerular filtration rate of 45 ml/min/1.72 m 2 . He was independent with his activities of daily living; however, he described New York Heart Association Class 2 dyspnoea. His medications included isosorbide mononitrate, candesartan, aspirin, atorvastatin and pantoprazole. His baseline troponin level during this admission was elevated to 66 ng/l, a change from 43 ng/l (reference range (cid:1) 16 ng/l) measured three weeks prior, and this was attributed to his gallbladder inflammation and renal dysfunction. A preoperative electrocardiogram (ECG) showed sinus rhythm with a heart rate (HR) of 66/min and left bundle branch block.