TASK DEFINITION: Given a passage, construct a question on the basis of the information present in the passage. Construct the question in such a way that (i) it is unambiguous, (ii) it is answerable from the passage, (iii) its answer is unique (iv) it answer uses text phrases from the passage. Avoid creating questions that (i) can't be answered correctly without actually understanding the passage and (ii) uses the same words or phrases given in the passage.
PROBLEM: The EuroSCORE (European System for cardiac operative risk evaluation) stratifies cardiac risk surgery in easy and accessible manner; it was validated in North America with good results but in many countries of Latin America is used routinely without prior validation. Our objective was to validate the EuroSCORE in patients with cardiac valve surgery at the Instituto Nacional de Cardiología Ignacio Chávez (INCICh) in México.', 'EuroSCORE additive and logistic models were used to predict mortality in adults undergoing cardiac valve surgery from march 2004 to march 2008. The goodness of fit test of Hosmer-Lemeshow was used to evaluate the calibration. The area under the ROC curve was calculated to determinate discrimination.', 'We included 1188 patients with ages of 51.3±14.5 years, 52% women. There were significant differences in the prevalence of risk factors among the INCICh and the EuroSCORE populations. Total mortality was 9.68% versus 5% and 5.6% predicted by additive and logistic EuroSCORE. According to additive EuroSCORE the risk was low in 11.3%, intermediate in 52.9% and high in 35.9%; for these groups the mortality was .7%, 6.34% and 17.4% against those predicted of 2%, 3.9% and 7.64%. Hosmer-Lemeshow test had a P<.001 for both models and the area under the ROC curve was .707 and .694 for additive and logistic EuroSCORE.

SOLUTION: Do [ EuroSCORE underestimate the mortality risk in cardiac valve surgery of Mexican population ]?

PROBLEM: Cardiometabolic disorders are rapidly becoming major public health challenges. Valproic acid (VPA) is a widely prescribed anticonvulsant drug.', 'We hypothesized that treatment with VPA would improve the regulation of glucose and atherogenic dyslipidemia through reduction in circulating corticosterone.', 'Female Wistar rats recieved (p.o.) combined oral contraceptive (COC) containing 1.0\u2009µg ethinylestradiol plus 5.0\u2009µg levonorgestrel and valproic acid (VPA; 20\u2009mg) for 8 weeks.', 'Treatment with COC led to elevated fasting blood glucose, insulin, corticosterone, triglycerides (TG), TG/HDL-cholesterol ratio, insulin resistance (IR) and impaired glucose tolerance. VPA significantly attenuated the alterations induced by COC treatment, but did not affect the corticosterone level. However, VPA treatment led to significant increases in plasma insulin, corticosterone, atherogenic lipids and impaired glucose tolerance in rats not treated with COC.

SOLUTION: Is improvement of oral contraceptive-induced glucose dysregulation and dyslipidemia by valproic acid independent of circulating corticosterone?

PROBLEM: The endogenous opioid system has been reportedly implicated in tobacco/nicotine dependence.', 'We examined the genetic effects of eight SNPs in opioid receptor-related genes on smoking status and smoking-related traits in Japanese.', 'The genotypic and allelic variations of the rs2229205 SNP in the OPRL1 gene were significantly associated with smoking status, but no significant differences were found in the genetic variations of any of the SNPs with regard to smoking-related traits. The rs2229205 SNP did not show high linkage disequilibrium with the other SNPs in the linkage disequilibrium block that contained the SNP.

SOLUTION:
Is nociceptin/orphanin FQ receptor gene variation associated with smoking status in Japanese?