bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Effects of combination treatment with theophylline sustained release tablets and thymalfasin on pulmonary function, immunity, and inflammation in elderly patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and respiratory failure
Authors: Liu Yu , Zhang Chunhui , Chen Xiulan 
Published: February 2023

Purpose: To investigate the effect of combined administration of theophylline sustained-release tablets and thymalfasin on pulmonary function, immunity, and inflammation in elderly patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and respiratory failure.
Methods: A total of 122 elderly patients in Fujian Geriatric Hospital, Fuzhou, China who suffered from acute attack of COPD with respiratory failure from January 2019 - January 2020 were selected for this study. The patients were divided randomly and evenly into study and control groups. Theophylline sustained-release tablets were administered to subjects in the control group, while theophylline sustained-release tablets and thymalfasin were administered to subjects in the study group. Pulmonary function indicators, viz, forced expiratory volume in one second (FEV1), forced vital capacity (FVC), and FEV1/FVC), blood gas indicators (PaCO2, PaO2, and SaO2), inflammatory factors (sICAM-1, PGE2, and hs-CRP), immune cells (Th17, Treg, and Th17/Treg), as well as exercise ability (the 6 min walking distance test) were evaluated for each group. Adverse reactions were also assessed.
Results: There were no significant differences in pulmonary function, blood gas, inflammation, immunity, and exercise ability between the two groups before treatment (p < 0.01). However, all parameters improved significantly for both groups after treatment, with better outcomes for all parameters in the study group. A proportion of (14.75 %) patients in the study group showed adverse events, while 13.11 % of the patients in the control group exhibited adverse effects, meaning that the study group had a slightly but not significantly higher rate of adverse events.
Conclusion: The combined administration of theophylline sustained-release tablets and thymalfasin reduces inflammation and improves physical immunity, leading to enhancement of blood gas and pulmonary function in elderly patients with COPD and respiratory failure. However, further clinical trials are required prior to application of this combination therapy in clinical practice.
Effect of intraspinal dexamethasone on intrapartum fever, and maternal and infant outcomes
Authors: Zhang Ran , Xu Min , Dai Junxia 
Published: February 2023

Purpose: To study the effect of intraspinal injection of dexamethasone (DXMS) on intrapartum fever and maternal and infant outcomes.
Methods: A total of 200 puerperal women who gave birth in The Fourth Hospital of Shi Jia Zhuang from May 2020 to September 2021 were randomly selected and randomly divided into two groups: routine group (control group) and study group, with 100 women in each group. The routine group received epidural block anesthesia. In addition to the treatment given to the routine group, mothers in the study group were injected with 5 mg of dexamethasone in the spinal canal through an epidural catheter. Pain, fever, as well as maternal and infant outcomes were evaluated.
Results: There were no statistically significant differences in the degree of pain between the two groups, before and 1 h after anesthesia (p > 0.05). However, visual analogue scale (VAS) scores at the end of the first and second stage of labor were significantly lower in the study group (1.76 ± 0.56 and 3.41 ± 0.39, respectively) than in the control group (4.73 ± 0.48 and 6.11 ± 0.63, respectively; p < 0.05). In the control group, 23 puerperal women (23 %) had body temperature ≥ 37.5 oC but < 38 oC, while 19 puerperal women (19 %) had body temperature ≥ 38 oC. There was no statistically significant difference in Apgar scores between the two groups at 1 min and 5 min after delivery (p > 0.05). In the control group, there were 9 (9 %) cases of headache, 5 (5 %) cases of prolonged labor, and 7 (7 %) cases of weak contractions, while the corresponding numbers in the study group were 2 (2 %), 0 (0 %) and 1 (1 %), respectively.
Conclusion: The use of intrathecal dexamethasone in women reduced maternal pain and likelihood of fever during labor, with no significant effect on the newborn.
MicroRNA 744 induces apoptosis and autophagy in human gastric cancer by targeting heparanase-1
Authors: Zhao Dan , Xie Xiaohong , Tan Qin , Zhao Xin , Xing Dingpei 
Published: February 2023

Purpose: To study the possible anti-cancer effects of miR-744 on human gastric cancer cells, and the underlying mechanism.
Methods: The mRNA expression of miR-744 was determined using qRT-PCR, while CCK-8, Annexin V/PI and acridine orange assays were used to determine cell viability, apoptosis and autophagy, respectively. The expressions of target proteins were determined using qRT-PCR and Immunoblotting.
Results: Significant suppressions of miR-744 were observed in gastric cancer tissues and cell lines. Overexpression of miR-744 inhibited the proliferation while silencing of miR-744 promoted the proliferation of gastric cancer cells. Furthermore, the tumor-suppressive effect of miR-744 in gastric cancer was due to induction of apoptosis and autophagy. Heparanase-1 (HPSE-1) was identified as the target of miR-744. Silencing of HSPE-1 significantly inhibited cell proliferation, whereas its overexpression significantly restored the growth-inhibitory effects of miR-744 overexpression on gastric cancer (p < 0.05).
Conclusion: These results indicate that miR-744 exerts a tumor-suppressive effect on the growth and proliferation of gastric cancer cells in vitro by targeting HPSE-1. There is need to further determine the anti-cancer effect of miR-744 expression in animal models.
Forgiveness
Authors: Norlock Kathryn J. 
Published: February 2023

Forgiveness is a response to wrongdoing characterised by forswearing or overcoming the fullness of the blame that one could otherwise justifiably hold against a wrongdoer. Forgiveness is distinct from dropping, ignoring, forgetting, or excusing a wrong. Most philosophers take forgiveness to be compatible with punishment and therefore distinct from pardon or mercy as well.
Some philosophers describe forgiveness as primarily an internal process, characterized by a change of heart or a choice to revise one’s dispositions, beliefs, or attitudes towards an offender. Others describe forgiveness as primarily a social practice, characterised by effecting a morally significant consequence such as the release or relief of an offender.
Central debates concern what reasons justify forswearing the fullness of one’s blame, who is in a position to do so, whether forgiveness must be communicated to one’s wrongdoer, whether it is always an undeserved gift or may be obligatory, and how it works, that is, what processes are involved in forswearing or overcoming the fullness of blame.
Persons
Authors: Olson Eric 
Published: February 2023

A person, as most philosophers use the term, is something with certain special mental properties. Locke, for example, defined ‘person’ as ‘a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places’. To be a person (at a time) is to be intelligent and self-conscious (at that time).
To say that something is a person is thus to say something about its mental properties. But we could know all about a thing’s mental properties without knowing the rest of its nature – what nonmental properties it has – just as we could know that something is a clock, or even know all about its timekeeping properties, without knowing its physical structure. The definition of ‘person’ as ‘intelligent, self-conscious being’ is like the definition of ‘clock’ as ‘device that measures time’: it specifies a role, but does not say what sort of thing fills the role.
Here are some things that persons – that is, people – have been taken to be:
Immaterial substances
Collections of mental states and events
Biological organisms
Parts of organisms
Nonorganisms constituted by organisms.
Some have even denied that there are any people at all: there are acts of thought, but no beings whose thoughts they are. There is no consensus on the matter, or even any dominant view.
It may be that different sorts of people belong to different metaphysical kinds, just as different sorts of clocks have different mechanisms. There are mechanical clocks made of springs and wheels, electronic digital clocks, atomic clocks and so on. Likewise, it may be that we human people are organisms, but some nonhuman people – gods, say, or the intelligent, self-conscious computers of the future – are not. This entry will consider only human people. It will discuss some of the main accounts of their nature, then briefly connect them to wider metaphysical themes.
Substance
Authors: Benovsky Jiri 
Published: February 2023

To understand the notion of substance in a neo-Aristotelian way, one first needs to understand the notion of a kind since the core idea is that substances fall under kinds. You are a human being, so you fall under the kind ‘human being’. Your kind is what defines you as being the substance you are – in short, it is the answer to the question ‘What is this object?’. When a kind is instantiated, an object exists. In this way of understanding the nature of substances, they are not built from more fundamental components (for instance, they are not bundles of various properties), rather substances are understood as instantiations of kinds, which are fundamental. But not all substances are equally fundamental. Indeed, they form a hierarchical structure where each substance plays a role in the resulting hierarchical network of interrelated ontological categories. Thus the notion of a substance is to be understood as part of a sophisticated and rich system of ontological categories, such as Jonathan Lowe’s or Joshua Hoffman’s and Gary Rosenkrantz’s.
A different way to understand the notion of a substance is a one-category ontology such as monism. In this view, there exists only one entity – only one substance – the universe. Horgan and Potrč defend such a view. In this view, the universe (which is the one and only object that exists) has a complex structure and is locally varied, but it does not have parts. The monist can appeal to a paraphrase strategy to talk about ordinary objects: whenever a realist about ordinary objects says that there is a tree, the monist can say that the world is locally tree-ish. In general, when it comes to our ordinary experience of the world, the monist claims that our experiences are the same whether the world contains trees or whether it is locally tree-ish. A different type of monism, namely priority monism, defended by Jonathan Schaffer, also claims that there is exactly one object that exists (the universe), but the idea is that it is the one and only fundamental object. That is, there is only one fundamental object but, in this view, it has parts. These parts are not fundamentally existing, they exist only in a derivative sense. So, like the neo-Aristotelian theories of substance, priority monism is a hierarchical ontology where some entities (i.e. one entity) are fundamental, while other entities are derivative.
Panpsychism
Authors: Goff Philip 
Published: February 2023

Panpsychism is the view that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the natural world. In a standard form of the view, the fundamental constituents of the physical world – perhaps electrons and quarks – have incredibly basic forms of conscious experience, and the consciousness of a human or animal brain is derived from the consciousness of its most basic parts.
The main attraction of panpsychism is its promise to provide a place for consciousness in our scientific story of the universe, and to do so in a way that avoids the deep difficulties associated with the more conventional options of physicalism and dualism. We know that consciousness is real – nothing is more evident than the reality of our feelings and experiences – and so we must find a way of fitting it into our overall theory of reality. The physicalist tries to account for consciousness in terms of purely physical processes in the brain, but there are powerful philosophical arguments against the coherence of this approach. The dualist posits consciousness as a non-physical feature of reality, outside of the physical workings of the body and brain, but this leads to challenges explaining how the non-physical mind causally impacts on the physical world given the common assumption that physical events form a causally closed system. The panpsychist hopes to avoid both of these problems by taking consciousness to be fundamental and yet part of physical world.
Opponents of panpsychism, however, argue that these supposed advantages cannot be had. According to constitutive panpsychism, facts about human and animal consciousness are nothing over and above facts about consciousness at the fundamental level. Critics argue that this form of panpsychism faces many of the same challenges as physicalism in trying to construct animal consciousness from consciousness postulated at the fundamental level. According to emergentist panpsychism, in contrast, human and animal consciousness causally arises from consciousness at a more fundamental level, and hence the facts about human and animal conscious minds cannot be reduced to facts at a more fundamental level. Critics argue that this form of panpsychism faces similar challenges to the dualist in trying to explain how irreducible animal consciousness impacts on the physical world. Either way, it is claimed, panpsychism offers no theoretical advance. I will respond to these criticisms, arguing that, in either constitutive or emergentist form, panpsychism is to be preferred over its rivals.
Time, metaphysics of
Authors: Deng Natalja 
Published: February 2023

Metaphysics is the part of philosophy that asks questions about the nature of reality – about what there is, and what it is like. The metaphysics of time is the part of the philosophy of time that asks questions about the nature of temporal reality. One central such question is that of whether time passes or flows, or whether it has a dynamic aspect. By this metaphysicians mean something very specific: is one time metaphysically privileged in some way, and does this metaphysical privilege move on from time to time? A-theorists answer in the affirmative, and different A-theorists offer different ways of thinking about the metaphysical privilege involved. Some say the privilege consists in being the only time that exists (presentism). On presentism, only the present exists, but which time that is changes as time passes. Other A-theorists, known as growing block theorists, say the metaphysical privilege consists in being the latest time that exists. On the growing block view, the past and the present exist, but the future does not. As time passes, new times comes into existence. Yet another version of the A-theory says that all times exist, but that one time is metaphysically privileged because it is present in an absolute sense. This version of the A-theory is known as the moving spotlight theory. Different times gain the privilege in turn by becoming the one time that is present in an absolute sense.
The A-theory is opposed by the B-theory. B-theorists take all times to exist (eternalism), but unlike moving spotlight theorists, they deny that any one time is metaphysically privileged in any way. Each time is present, but only relative to itself, not in an absolute sense. The B-theory is usefully understood by comparison with views about space. A natural view of space is that all spatial locations exist and that none is ‘here’ in an absolute sense, even though each one is ‘here’ relative to itself. The B-theory says the same about time. Thus, according to B-theorists, time is in a key respect much like space: what is past, present or future is just a matter of temporal perspective, just like what is here or over there is a matter of spatial perspective.
Modern physics is more hospitable to the B-theory than to the A-theory, while ordinary thought and experience arguably favour the A-theory. One reaction to this is to endorse the B-theory, but to ask why it is that time presents itself in ordinary thought and experience as being different from how it really is. There is a growing literature on this problem that draws on cognitive science work on time perception.
Social metaphysics
Authors: Mason Rebecca 
Published: February 2023

Social metaphysics concerns the existence and nature of social entities. Social metaphysicians have focused primarily on the existence and nature of three ontological categories: social facts (e.g. the fact that pieces of paper are money), social kinds (e.g. races and genders) and social groups (e.g. the United Nations Security Council).
Social facts (e.g. the fact that bills issued by the United States Bureau of Engraving and Printing are money) are understood to be worldly rather than representational entities. According to one family of views, all social facts obtain in virtue of facts involving collective intentionality. There are a wide variety of theories of collective intentions; however, the basic idea is that social facts are such that their existence depends on the mental states of more than one individual.
A perennial question concerning the metaphysics of social kinds is whether they are natural kinds. Very roughly, natural kinds are those kinds that feature in scientific explanations of the world. Some philosophers deny that social kinds are natural kinds because the former are mind-dependent whereas the latter are not. Others deny that social kinds are natural, because they are susceptible to ‘looping effects’. Still others argue that social kinds can be natural kinds despite these apparently disqualifying features.
Another key question about social kinds concerns their existence or reality – in particular, the existence or reality of particular social kinds, like genders (e.g. women and men) and races (e.g. Black, white). Some philosophers argue that races are biological kinds, and that biological races exist. Others argue that races are biological kinds, but that biological races do not exist. Social constructionists about race argue that races exist but are social in nature. Another view is that races exist but are neither social nor biological.
Finally, although it is common ground that many social groups exist, philosophers disagree about their nature. One proposal is that social groups are sets of their members; another is that they are identical to sets of worlds, times and individuals. Others argue that social groups are sui generis entities, or that they are structured wholes.
Corporations and justice
Authors: Hughes Robert , Strudler Alan 
Published: February 2023

For the past half century, there has been a large controversy within academic business ethics, in legal scholarship, and in the larger public about the role that corporations should have in addressing social injustices. Do corporations have a moral obligation to conduct business in a way that reduces poverty, racial inequality, other unjust economic and social inequalities, and unjust threats to the environment? Or should for-profit corporations focus on making money and leave solutions of these social problems to governments, nonprofit organizations, and private individuals?
There are related but distinct controversies about corporations’ moral duties of transactional and relational justice. One important question is whether financial agreements or employment contracts can be wrongfully exploitative despite being fully consensual and beneficial to all parties. This question is distinct from the question whether corporations have a duty to promote distributive justice. Transactional unfairness is arguably possible in society with a just economic system, and fair transactions are presumably possible in a society with an unjust distribution. There are also important questions about the extent of firms’ moral obligation to avoid pollution, to refrain from discrimination, to treat employees fairly, and to respect the democratic process. These moral obligations may require more than obeying the relevant law.
Much of the literature on business and justice is framed in terms of the responsibilities of for-profit corporations in particular. Many but not all of the claims business ethicists defend about corporations also apply to for-profit businesses that are not corporations, such as partnerships. The philosophical literature on business and justice focuses on normative questions. There is an important literature in psychology on the empirical question when people are most likely to perceive a corporate practice as unjust.
Embodied cognition
Authors: Rupert Rob 
Published: February 2023

The embodied view of cognition emphasizes the contribution of nonneural factors to the production of intelligent behaviour and to the shaping of conscious experience. Such factors include (a) the body’s physical form (both gross and specific), (b) the body’s particular dynamics (the characteristic ways in which it moves), (c) the neural representation of the body and of its dynamics, and (d) the kinds of interaction with the environment (including other agents) afforded by all of the preceding factors. Thus, the embodied-cognition movement provides a broad umbrella, covering a multiplicity of hypotheses and research programs. A core idea binds them together, however: that the material bases of cognition, particularly those beyond the brain, determine the nature of a creature’s cognitive processing, in a way that renders the result highly contingent on what bodily materials a creature happens to be made of, how that material happens to be organized, what goals and drives a creature happens to have, and on the structure of the environment in which that creature happens to function.
In order to appreciate the import of the embodied-cognition movement, it may prove fruitful to contrast it with an influential alternative: the computer-based approach to cognition and the research programs to which it gave rise. During the early decades of cognitive science, much research was dominated by the idea that cognition is computation. In this vein, computational solutions to problems were often explored independent of data on human performance, driven instead by mathematical and logical considerations alone. It may well be an interesting question in its own right how, for example, to search optimally through a given data base with the goal of solving a certain sort of problem as quickly as possible. According to embodiment theorists, though, this kind of research yields little of interest concerning actual cognition. On their view, considerations of optimal search or maximal problem-solving efficiency (say, identifying the best move in a game of chess) are largely a distraction to cognitive science. Instead, embodiment theorists insist that, if one hopes to model the cognitive activity of members of a given species, one must treat cognition as a solution to a problem for that kind of creature, with its body, in its environment, with its particular set of resources that can be assembled in more or less ad hoc and task-specific ways.