bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Correlation between histology and nerve excitability after reinnervation of paralyzed strap muscles in the rabbit
Authors: Broniatowski Michael , Grundfest‐Broniatowski Sharon , Chou Samuel M. , Nosé Yukihiko , Tucker Harvey M. 
Published: April 2016

We have recently shown that the mean muscle chronaxie for nerve pedicle implanted into denervated rabbit strap muscle is comparable to that of normal nerve. This study correlates excitability with histologic characteristics of muscles reinnervated via nerve‐muscle pedicles (NMP) and direct nerve implants (DNI). Strength duration curves were measured in 13 rabbits 3.5 to 5 months after reinnervation by NMP (n = 6) and DNI (n = 7). Following this, control (n = 5) and reinnervated straps were harvested immediately before the animals were killed and frozen in liquid nitrogen. The material was submitted for hematoxylin‐eosin stains as well as trichrome stains for general morphology, myofibrillar ATPase and NADH for fiber typing, and cholinesterase for determination of denervated fibers. In all animals with low chronaxie, expected type grouping from reinnervation was noted (n = 10). By contrast, the three animals in which chronaxie was abnormally elevated demonstrated fibrosis, inflammation, and absence of or poor type grouping. This suggests that type grouping is necessary for excitability after reinnervation of paralyzed striated muscles.
Argon laser irradiation of the otolithic organ
Authors: Okuno Taeko , Nomura Yasuya , Young Yi‐Ho , Hara Makoto 
Published: April 2016

An argon laser was used to irradiate the otolithic organs of guinea pigs and cynomolgus monkeys. After stapedectomy, the argon laser (1.5 W × 0.5 sec/shot) irradiated the utricle or saccule without touching the sensory organs. The stapes was replaced over the oval window after irradiation. The animals used for acute observation were killed immediately for morphologic studies; those used for long‐term observation were kept alive for 2, 4, or 10 weeks. Acute observation revealed that sensory and supporting cells were elevated from the basement membrane only in the irradiated area. No rupture of the membranous labyrinth was observed. Long‐term observation revealed that the otolith of the macula utriculi had disappeared in 2‐week specimens. The entire macula utriculi had disappeared in 10‐week specimens. No morphologic changes were observed in cochlea, semicircular canals, or membranous labyrinth. The saccule showed similar changes.
Metronidazole in head and neck surgery—The effect of lengthened prophylaxis
Authors: Sawyer Robert , Cozzi Laura , Rosenthal David I. , Maniglia Anthony J. 
Published: April 2016

Previous studies of antibiotic prophylaxis have shown that treatment for 24 hours has been beneficial for head and neck surgery and that longer periods of antibiotic therapy have not improved results. Metronidazole (Flagyl), unlike other antibiotics tested, has been shown to be effective in an experimental abscess, even if treatment is begun up to 120 hours after administration of inoculum. This article presents a prospective, randomized, multifactorial study comparing a brief vs. a prolonged duration of metronidazole and cefazolin prophylaxis in 50 consecutive patients with a head and neck cancer undergoing operation. Patients receiving 2 days vs. 7 or more days of antibiotic prophylaxis were compared. Statistical analysis of data demonstrated a striking reduction in severity of wound complications and a reduced incidence of wound infections in the group treated with 7 or more days of antibiotic prophylaxis.
Development and validation of the hypoglycaemia problem-solving scale for people with diabetes mellitus
Authors: Wu Fei-Ling , Juang Jyuhn-Huarng , Lin Chia-Hung 
Published: April 2016

Objective To develop and psychometrically test a new instrument, the hypoglycaemia problem-solving scale (HPSS), which was designed to measure how well people with diabetes mellitus manage their hypoglycaemia-related problems. Methods A cross-sectional survey design approach was used to validate the performance assessment instrument. Patients who had a diagnosis of type 1 or type 2 diabetes mellitus for at least 1 year, who were being treated with insulin and who had experienced at least one hypoglycaemic episode within the previous 6 months were eligible for inclusion in the study. Results A total of 313 patients were included in the study. The initial draft of the HPSS included 28 items. After exploratory factor analysis, the 24-item HPSS consisted of seven factors: problem-solving perception, detection control, identifying problem attributes, setting problem-solving goals, seeking preventive strategies, evaluating strategies, and immediate management. The Cronbach’s α for the total HPSS was 0.83. Conclusions The HPSS was verified as being valid and reliable. Future studies should further test and improve the instrument to increase its effectiveness in helping people with diabetes manage their hypoglycaemia-related problems.
Trends in Authorship Characteristics in The American Journal of Sports Medicine, 1994 to 2014
Authors: Schrock John B. , Kraeutler Matthew J. , McCarty Eric C. 
Published: April 2016

Background: Trends in author qualifications, the number of authors per article, and the internationalization of author groups in sports medicine journals have not been widely investigated. Purpose: To examine trends in authorship characteristics in a single prominent sports medicine journal. Study Design: Systematic review. Methods: Articles published in The American Journal of Sports Medicine ( AJSM) in 1994, 2004, and 2014 were reviewed. For each article, the academic degree(s) of the first and last author, the total number of authors, the country of the author group, and academic institution status were recorded. Results: A total of 708 articles met the inclusion criteria: 129 in 1994, 244 in 2004, and 335 in 2014. There were significant differences in the proportion of first authors with an MD degree (80% in 1994, 75% in 2004, 67% in 2014; P = .01), a dual MD/PhD degree (4.7% in 1994, 6.2% in 2004, 9.3% in 2014; P < .001), and a bachelor’s degree (0% in 1994, 0% in 2004, 3.9% in 2014; P < .001). The proportion of last authors with an MD/PhD significantly increased over the 2 decades studied (7% in 1994, 13% in 2004, 17% in 2014; P = .01). The mean number of authors per article also significantly increased (3.8 in 1994, 4.3 in 2004, 5.8 in 2014; P < .0001). The proportion of articles published by an international group and the proportion of articles published by an academic institution increased over the 20-year span as well (both P < .0001). Conclusion: Within the past 2 decades, there has been a significant increase in the average number of authors per article in AJSM, as well as a higher proportion of international groups and academic institutions publishing in the journal. More nonphysicians are publishing in AJSM, with a significantly higher percentage of first authors with a bachelor’s degree as their highest degree. This is likely due to a combination of a general increased interest in research as well as increased competition among medical students. These factors have likely led to larger research groups and thus a significantly higher average number of authors per article.
Intracellular plasmid DNA delivery by self-assembled nanoparticles of amphiphilic PHML-b-PLLA-b-PHML copolymers and the endocytosis pathway analysis
Authors: Sun Jingjing , Luo Ting , Sheng Ruilong , Li Hui , Wang Zhao , Cao Amin 
Published: April 2016

This work presents a new series of polycationic nanoparticles of ( l-)-lysine conjugated amphiphilic triblock copolymer poly(hydroxyletheyl methacrylate-L-lysine)- b-poly(L-lactide)- b-poly(hydroxyletheyl methacrylate-L-lysine)s (PHML- b-PLLA- b-PHML) as potent low cytotoxic vectors for intracellular plasmid DNA delivery. First, the triblock PHML- b-PLLA- b-PHML copolymers were prepared via a combination of metal-free controlled ring opening polymerization and successive atom transfer radical polymerization. Then the cationic PHML- b-PLLA- b-PHML nanoparticles were further prepared by solution self-assembly. The particle size, zeta potential and morphology of as-prepared PHML- b-PLLA- b-PHML nanoparticles were characterized by dynamic light scattering and atomic force microscopy, respectively. The plasmid DNA binding affinities and polyplex stabilities were separately explored by agarose gel retardation and DNase I degradation assays. Then in vitro cytotoxicity and gene transfection efficiency of the PHML- b-PLLA- b-PHML nanoparticles vectors as well as relevant polyplex endocytosis pathway were investigated with H1299 cells. It was revealed that the PHML- b-PLLA- b-PHML nanoparticles exhibited low cytotoxicity, strong plasmid DNA binding affinity, high polyplex stability and efficient plasmid DNA transfection even under serum conditions (10% FBS). Moreover, the endocytosis analysis results disclosed that the PHML30- b-PLLA- b-PHML30 nanoparticle/plasmid DNA polyplexes were predominantly involved in lipid-raft-mediated endocytosis pathway, similar to that of SV40 virus-based vectors.
Clinical outcomes of lupus nephritis patients with different proportions of crescents
Authors: Zhang W , Yuan M , Hong L , Zhou Q , Chen W , Yang S , Yang Q , Chen W , Yu X 
Published: April 2016

Background The prognostic significance of different proportions of crescents in lupus nephritis (LN) remains unclear. We assessed the long-term prognosis of LN patients with different proportions of crescents. Methods In this single-center, retrospective cohort study, 788 eligible LN patients were enrolled. The primary endpoint was doubling of baseline serum creatinine and end-stage renal disease; the secondary endpoint was death. Results There were 406 (51.5%) patients demonstrating crescents at biopsy, and they had more severe baseline status: lower estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR), more proteinuria, more severe microscopic hematuria, and higher pathological scores for both activity index (AI) and chronicity index (CIn) (all p < 0.001, respectively). After a median follow-up period of 56 months (range: 3–172 months), no significant differences were observed in terms of renal or patient survival in these two groups ( p = 0.188). In LN patients with crescents, patient survival was poorer along with the increase in the proportion of crescents; for crescentic LN, patient survival was 78.9% at five years and 52.6% at 10 years (vs. subgroups of crescent proportion <10%, 10%–19%, 20%–49%: 95.5%, 92.3%, 91.7% at five years; 86.1%, 80.1%, 66.5% at 10 years, respectively, p = 0.008). Furthermore, there were higher proportions of crescents independently predicted for adverse outcomes of renal progression and mortality ( p = 0.049) after adjusting for age, sex, baseline eGFR, proteinuria, AI, and CIn in the multivariate Cox proportional hazard model. Conclusion The overall long-term renal survival of LN patients with and without crescents was comparable. However, a higher proportion of crescents increased the risk for unfavorable outcomes. Therefore, more attention should be paid to the lesions of crescents, and more prospective studies are needed to explore the optimal regimens for LN patients with different proportions of crescents.
Association between functional NLRP3 polymorphisms and susceptibility to autoimmune and inflammatory diseases: a meta-analysis
Authors: Lee Y H , Bae S-C 
Published: April 2016

Objective This study determined whether NLRP3 polymorphisms rs35829419 C/A and rs10754558 C/G were associated with autoimmune and inflammatory diseases. Methods An association between the NLRP3 rs35829419 C/A and rs10754558 C/G polymorphisms and autoimmune and inflammatory diseases was determined by performing a meta-analysis by using (1) allele contrast, (2) recessive, (3) dominant, and (4) co-dominant models. Results Thirty comparative studies involving 8069 patients and 8824 controls were included in the meta-analysis. No association was observed between autoimmune and inflammatory diseases and NLRP3 rs35829419 C allele (OR = 1.020, 95% CI = 0.804–1.295, p = 0.869). Stratification by ethnicity showed no association between the NLRP3 rs35829419 C allele and autoimmune and inflammatory diseases in European, Latin American, and Polynesian populations. Stratification by disease type showed no association between the NLRP3 rs35829419 C allele and gout, SLE, RA, celiac disease, and Crohn’s disease. Moreover, no association was observed between autoimmune and inflammatory diseases and the NLRP3 rs10754558 C allele (OR = 1.057, 95% CI = 0.950–1.177, p = 0.310). However, stratification by ethnicity showed an association between the NLRP3 rs10754558 C allele and autoimmune and inflammatory diseases in the Latin American (OR = 1.399, 95% CI = 1.201–1.630, p = 1.6 × 10–6) but not in European and Asian populations. Further, stratification by disease type showed a significant association of the NLRP3 rs10754558 C allele with SLE (OR = 1.465 95% CI = 1.144–1.875, p = 0.002) but not with gout and celiac disease. The same pattern was observed for the NLRP3 rs10754558 C allele in the recessive model. Conclusions Our results indicated that the NLRP3 rs10754558 C/G polymorphism was associated with susceptibility to SLE and with autoimmune and inflammatory diseases in Latin American individuals.
Enduring capital flow constraints and the 2007–2008 financial and euro zone crises
Authors: Thompson Helen 
Published: April 2016

This article analyses the 2007–2008 financial and the euro zone crises through the lens of an international capital flows crisis for European banks and the euro zone periphery. The notion of a specific Anglo-American weakness created by extreme financialisation and then made manifest in the financial crisis cannot explain why the experience of large commercial and universal French, German and UK banks during the two crises was much more similar to each other than the similarity between that of UK banks and US banks. Internationalised balance sheets, and in particular a dollar funding dependency, left these French, German and UK banks extremely vulnerable to crisis. French and German banks faced the same dollar funding crises at different junctures during the financial and euro zone crises, and from May 2010 to December 2012, these crises track the development of the euro zone crisis as experienced in the periphery. This dollar dependency ultimately made the survival of these banks dependent on financial support from the Federal Reserve Board, showing the limits of what states, other than the United States, can do to bailout financial corporations. For the periphery economies, the euro zone crisis recreated pre-monetary union problems with capital flight in a new form and created a new problem around access to emergency credit that led directly to a loss of economic and political autonomy. As international market-based banking took hold across advanced-country economies, European banks stood at the centre of a large increase in international capital flows. Acute disruption of these flows was central to the experience of large French, German and UK banks during the 2007–2008 financial crisis and the euro zone crisis and to the euro zone periphery during the euro zone crisis. The crises around these flows show the explanatory importance of structural external constraints in understanding the economic and political predicaments of financialised economies both in terms of destabilising international financial markets and the power dynamics created by access to emergency credit.
Using affective brain-computer interfaces to characterize human influential factors for speech quality-of-experience perception modelling
Authors: Gupta Rishabh , Laghari Khalil , Banville Hubert , Falk Tiago H. 
Published: April 2016

AbstractAs new speech technologies emerge, telecommunication service providers have to provide superior user experience in order to remain competitive. To this end, quality-of-experience (QoE) perception modelling and measurement has become a key priority. QoE models rely on three influence factors: technological, contextual and human. Existing solutions have typically relied on the former two and human influence factors (HIFs) have been mostly neglected due to difficulty in measuring them. In this paper, we show that measuring human affective states is important for QoE measurement and propose the use of affective brain-computer interfaces (aBCIs) for objective measurement of perceived QoE for two emerging speech technologies, namely far-field hands-free communications and text-to-speech systems. When incorporating subjectively-derived HIFs into the QoE model, gains of up to 26.3 % could be found relative to utilizing only technological factors. When utilizing HIFs derived from an electroencephalography (EEG) based aBCI, in turn, gains of up to 14.5 % were observed. These findings show the importance of using aBCIs in QoE measurement and also highlight that further improvement may be warranted once improved affective state correlates are found from EEGs and/or other neurophysiological modalities.
Invasive Narratives and the Inverse of Slow Violence: Alien Species in Science and Society
Authors: Lidström Susanna , West Simon , Katzschner Tania , Pérez-Ramos M. Isabel , Twidle Hedley 
Published: April 2016

AbstractEnvironmental narratives have become an increasingly important area of study in the environmental humanities. Rob Nixon has drawn attention to the difficulties of representing the complex processes of environmental change that inflict ‘slow violence’ on vulnerable human (and non-human) populations. Nixon argues that a lack of “arresting stories, images and symbols” reduces the visibility of gradual problems such as biodiversity loss, climate change and chemical pollution in cultural imaginations and on political agendas. We agree with Nixon that addressing this representational imbalance is an important mission for the environmental humanities. However, we argue that another aspect of the same imbalance, or representational bias, suggests the inverse of this is also needed—to unpack the ways that complicated and multifaceted environmental phenomena can be reduced to fast, simple, evocative, invasive narratives that percolate through science, legislation, policy and civic action, and to examine how these narratives can drown out rather than open up possibilities for novel social-ecological engagements. In this article we demonstrate the idea of invasive narratives through a case study of the ‘invasive alien species' (IAS) narrative in South Africa. We suggest that IAS reduces complex webs of ecological, biological, economic, and cultural relations to a simple ‘good’ versus ‘bad’ battle between easily discernible ‘natural’ and ‘non-natural’ identities. We argue that this narrative obstructs the options available to citizens, land managers and policy-makers and prevents a more nuanced understanding of the dynamics and implications of biodiversity change, in South Africa and beyond.
Mathematizing Nature's Messiness: Graphical Representations of Variation in Ecology, 1930-Present
Authors: Martin Laura J. 
Published: April 2016

AbstractThis article explores the rise of the line graph and an associated statistical method, linear regression, in ecology. At the turn of the 20th century, many ecologists studied variation in organismal traits, like height and weight, among populations of a species. The statistical practice of “polygons of variation” emerged out of such studies. But between 1930 and 1950, polygons of variation were gradually eclipsed by line graphs. Motivated by the recent and disastrous Dust Bowl, American ecologists began to place organismal variables and environmental variables on the same graph. They began to use linear regression, a then-obscure statistical method first developed to study whether parents passed their morphological traits onto offspring, to interpret these graphs. This use of linear regression marked an important shift in how ecologists interpreted biological variation. Variation—once ecologists' object of study—was now noise. Yet ecologists did not abandon their commitment to the idea that nature is complex, various, and interconnected. Rather, they came to read biologically meaningful patterns in seemingly “messy” graphs, using linear regression differently than other scientists, even those in closely allied disciplines. I situate this analysis in a broad STS literature on modeling that has tended to analyze the decision to model, or the choice of variables to include in a model, rather than how practitioners interpret the models they choose. I contend that not only has ecologists' use of linear regression shaped understandings of nature, but ecologists' understandings of nature have also shaped their use of linear regression.
Thinking About Inheritance Through the Figure of the Anthropocene, from the Antipodes and in the Presence of Others
Authors: Instone Lesley , Taylor Affrica 
Published: April 2016

Abstract
Modes of thinking matter. In this article we engage with the figure of the Anthropocene as the impetus for rethinking the messy environmental legacies of Australian settler colonialism that we have inherited. We do this rethinking in a small rural valley community, where the intractable realities of human and more than human settler colonial relations are played out on a daily basis. We also try to do this rethinking collectively, in the presence of other animals with whom our inherited pasts, our mundane everyday presents and our uncertain futures are inextricably enmeshed. What comes of all this thinking is a common account of mutual multispecies vulnerabilities and of collective agencies that recasts the dominant tales of a singular Anthropocene and the conventional human-centred inheritances of a rural Australian place.
Unruly Raccoons and Troubled Educators: Nature/Culture Divides in a Childcare Centre
Authors: Pacini-Ketchabaw Veronica , Nxumalo Fikile 
Published: April 2016

AbstractCurrent times of anthropogenically damaged landscapes call us to re-think human and nonhuman relations and consider multiple possibilities for alternative and more sustainable futures. As many environmental and Indigenous humanities scholars have noted, central to this re-thinking is unsettling the colonial nature/culture divide in Western epistemology. In this article, through a series of situated, small, everyday stories from childcare centres, we relate raccoon-child-educator encounters in order to consider how raccoons' repeated boundary-crossing and their apprehension as unruly subjects might reveal the impossibility of the nature/culture divide. We tell these stories, not to offer a final fixed solution to the asymmetrical, awkward and frictional entanglements of humans' and raccoons' lives, but as a responsive telling that may bring forth new possibilities for responsible, affective and ethical co-habitations.