Dental anxiety among patients visiting a University Dental Centre

Objective: Fearful individuals often avoid care despite extensive dental needs and anxious patients feel more pain and of longer duration than less anxious patients. This study was designed to determine the prevalence and factors associated with dental anxiety among patients visiting a University Dental Centre in Nigeria. Method: This cross-sectional study was conducted using an anonymous structured questionnaire randomly administered to patients attending the University College Hospital Dental Centre, Ibadan. The questionnaire requested for socio-demographic data, dental visit behaviour, history of traumatic dental treatment and level of apprehension when anticipating a visit to the dentist and physician. The level of dental anxiety was determined using the Modified Dental Anxiety Scale (MDAS). An MDAS score of 19 and above indicated high dental anxiety. Upon examination, DMFT of each patient was determined. Result: A total of 471 respondents of which 262 (55.6%) were females participated in the study. Only 7.43% of the participants had MDAS score ≥19. About 10% of the females had high dental anxiety compared with 4.94% recorded for the males (p=0.01). Dental anxiety was more common among the younger age group, irregular oral health care seekers and among those with history of traumatic dental treatment. The respondents were more relaxed when anticipating a visit to a physician. Only gender could be used to predict high dental anxiety. Female gender significantly displayed high dental anxiety (odd ratio=3.05 and p=0.04) . The mean DMFT score for the patients was 2.48±3.30. Conclusion: The prevalence of dental anxiety among the respondents in this study was 7.43% and only gender could be used to predict dental anxiety

Concurrent Cemento-Osseous Dysplasia and Osteogenic Sarcoma: Report of Two Cases

Aim. Cemento-osseous dysplasia (COD) represents a rare group of benign fibroosseous disorders, while osteogenic sarcoma (OS) on the hand, is a malignant tumour of ominous prognosis. A combination of COD and OS is rare and sparsely reported in literature. There are only four reported cases known to the authors. The aim of this paper is to report additional cases of COD occurring concurrently with OS. Materials and Methods. The clinicoradiologic findings and histological analysis of mandibular lesions in two patients who reported at the Dental Centre of the University College Hospital, Ibadan, Nigeria, are presented. Results. The two patients were diagnosed of mandible osteosarcoma occurring concurrently with bilateral mandibular focal cemento-osseous dysplasia. Conclusion. The simultaneous occurrence of osteosarcoma and cemento-osseous dysplasia raises the question of whether COD has transformed into OS or a collision tumour has occurred and their simultaneous occurrence is just a coincidence

Design of Pre-Dumping Ring Spin Rotator with a Possibility of Helicity Switching for Polarized Positrons at the ILC

The use of polarized beams enhance the possibility of the precision measurements at the International Linear Collider (ILC). In order to preserve the degree of polarization during beam transport spin rotators are included in the current TDR ILC Lattice. In this report some advantages of using a combined spin rotator/spin flipper are discussed. A few possible lattice designs of spin flipper developed at DESY in 2012 are presented.Comment: Talk presented at the International Workshop on Future Linear Colliders (LCWS15), Whistler, Canada, 2-6 November 201

Coupled FCT-HP for Analytical Solutions of the Generalized Timefractional Newell-Whitehead-Segel Equation

This paper considers the generalized form of the time-fractional Newell-Whitehead-Segel model (TFNWSM) with regard to exact solutions via the application of Fractional Complex Transform (FCT) coupled with He’s polynomials method of solution. This is applied to two forms of the TFNWSM viz: nonlinear and linear forms of the time-fractional NWSM equation whose derivatives are based on Jumarie’s sense. The results guarantee the reliability and efficiency of the proposed method with less computation time while still maintaining high level of accuracy

Diarrhea in young children from low-income countries leads to large-scale alterations in intestinal microbiota composition

Acknowledgments This work was funded in part by the William and Melinda Gates Foundation, award 42917 to JPN and OCS; US National Institutes of Health grants 5R01HG005220 to HCB, 5R01HG004885 to MP; US National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship award DGE0750616 to JNP; AWW and JP are funded by The Wellcome Trust (Grant No. WT098051).Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Production of highly-polarized positrons using polarized electrons at MeV energies

The Polarized Electrons for Polarized Positrons experiment at the injector of the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility has demonstrated for the first time the efficient transfer of polarization from electrons to positrons produced by the polarized bremsstrahlung radiation induced by a polarized electron beam in a high-$Z$ target. Positron polarization up to 82\% have been measured for an initial electron beam momentum of 8.19~MeV/$c$, limited only by the electron beam polarization. This technique extends polarized positron capabilities from GeV to MeV electron beams, and opens access to polarized positron beam physics to a wide community.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure

Secondary technical resectability of colorectal cancer liver metastases after chemotherapy with or without selective internal radiotherapy in the randomized SIRFLOX trial

Secondary resection of initially unresectable colorectal cancer liver metastases (CRLM) can prolong survival. The added value of selective internal radiotherapy (SIRT) to downsize lesions for resection is not known. This study evaluated the change in technical resectability of CRLM with the addition of SIRT to FOLFOX-based chemotherapy. Baseline and follow-up hepatic imaging of patients who received modified FOLFOX (mFOLFOX6: fluorouracil, leucovorin, oxaliplatin) chemotherapy with or without bevacizumab (control arm) versus mFOLFOX6 (with or without bevacizumab) plus SIRT using yttrium-90 resin microspheres (SIRT arm) in the phase III SIRFLOX trial were reviewed by three or five (of 14) expert hepatopancreatobiliary surgeons for resectability. Reviewers were blinded to one another, treatment assignment, extrahepatic disease status, and information on clinical and scanning time points. Technical resectability was defined as at least 60 per cent of reviewers (3 of 5, or 2 of 3) assessing a patient’s liver metastases as surgically removable. Some 472 patients were evaluable (SIRT, 244; control, 228). There was no significant baseline difference in the proportion of technically resectable liver metastases between SIRT (29, 11⋅9 per cent) and control (25, 11⋅0 per cent) arms (P = 0⋅775). At follow-up, significantly more patients in both arms were deemed technically resectable compared with baseline: 159 of 472 (33⋅7 per cent) versus 54 of 472 (11⋅4 per cent) respectively (P = 0⋅001). More patients were resectable in the SIRT than in the control arm: 93 of 244 (38⋅1 per cent) versus 66 of 228 (28⋅9 per cent) respectively (P < 0⋅001). Adding SIRT to chemotherapy may improve the resectability of unresectable CRLM

Development of Bioinformatics Infrastructure for Genomics Research in H3Africa

Background: Although pockets of bioinformatics excellence have developed in Africa, generally, large-scale genomic data analysis has been limited by the availability of expertise and infrastructure. H3ABioNet, a pan-African bioinformatics network, was established to build capacity specifically to enable H3Africa (Human Heredity and Health in Africa) researchers to analyze their data in Africa. Since the inception of the H3Africa initiative, H3ABioNet’s role has evolved in response to changing needs from the consortium and the African bioinformatics community. Objectives: H3ABioNet set out to develop core bioinformatics infrastructure and capacity for genomics research in various aspects of data collection, transfer, storage, and analysis. Methods and Results: Various resources have been developed to address genomic data management and analysis needs of H3Africa researchers and other scientific communities on the continent. NetMap was developed and used to build an accurate picture of network performance within Africa and between Africa and the rest of the world, and Globus Online has been rolled out to facilitate data transfer. A participant recruitment database was developed to monitor participant enrollment, and data is being harmonized through the use of ontologies and controlled vocabularies. The standardized metadata will be integrated to provide a search facility for H3Africa data and biospecimens. Because H3Africa projects are generating large-scale genomic data, facilities for analysis and interpretation are critical. H3ABioNet is implementing several data analysis platforms that provide a large range of bioinformatics tools or workflows, such as Galaxy, the Job Management System, and eBiokits. A set of reproducible, portable, and cloud-scalable pipelines to support the multiple H3Africa data types are also being developed and dockerized to enable execution on multiple computing infrastructures. In addition, new tools have been developed for analysis of the uniquely divergent African data and for downstream interpretation of prioritized variants. To provide support for these and other bioinformatics queries, an online bioinformatics helpdesk backed by broad consortium expertise has been established. Further support is provided by means of various modes of bioinformatics training. Conclusions: For the past 4 years, the development of infrastructure support and human capacity through H3ABioNet, have significantly contributed to the establishment of African scientific networks, data analysis facilities, and training programs. Here, we describe the infrastructure and how it has affected genomics and bioinformatics research in Africa

Penumbral Rescue by normobaric O = O administration in patients with ischemic stroke and target mismatch proFile (PROOF): Study protocol of a phase IIb trial.

Oxygen is essential for cellular energy metabolism. Neurons are particularly vulnerable to hypoxia. Increasing oxygen supply shortly after stroke onset could preserve the ischemic penumbra until revascularization occurs. PROOF investigates the use of normobaric oxygen (NBO) therapy within 6 h of symptom onset/notice for brain-protective bridging until endovascular revascularization of acute intracranial anterior-circulation occlusion. Randomized (1:1), standard treatment-controlled, open-label, blinded endpoint, multicenter adaptive phase IIb trial. Primary outcome is ischemic core growth (mL) from baseline to 24 h (intention-to-treat analysis). Secondary efficacy outcomes include change in NIHSS from baseline to 24 h, mRS at 90 days, cognitive and emotional function, and quality of life. Safety outcomes include mortality, intracranial hemorrhage, and respiratory failure. Exploratory analyses of imaging and blood biomarkers will be conducted. Using an adaptive design with interim analysis at 80 patients per arm, up to 456 participants (228 per arm) would be needed for 80% power (one-sided alpha 0.05) to detect a mean reduction of ischemic core growth by 6.68 mL, assuming 21.4 mL standard deviation. By enrolling endovascular thrombectomy candidates in an early time window, the trial replicates insights from preclinical studies in which NBO showed beneficial effects, namely early initiation of near 100% inspired oxygen during short temporary ischemia. Primary outcome assessment at 24 h on follow-up imaging reduces variability due to withdrawal of care and early clinical confounders such as delayed extubation and aspiration pneumonia. ClinicalTrials.gov: NCT03500939; EudraCT: 2017-001355-31

MasakhaNER 2.0: Africa-centric Transfer Learning for Named Entity Recognition

African languages are spoken by over a billion people, but are underrepresented in NLP research and development. The challenges impeding progress include the limited availability of annotated datasets, as well as a lack of understanding of the settings where current methods are effective. In this paper, we make progress towards solutions for these challenges, focusing on the task of named entity recognition (NER). We create the largest human-annotated NER dataset for 20 African languages, and we study the behavior of state-of-the-art cross-lingual transfer methods in an Africa-centric setting, demonstrating that the choice of source language significantly affects performance. We show that choosing the best transfer language improves zero-shot F1 scores by an average of 14 points across 20 languages compared to using English. Our results highlight the need for benchmark datasets and models that cover typologically-diverse African languages