The efficacy of group hiking on some physical health indexes and quality of life of chronic schizophrenic patients: A randomized clinical trial

زمینه و هدف: بیماران مبتلا به اسکیزوفرنی مزمن تحت درمان با برخی داروهای آنتی سایکوتیک از اختلالات متابولیکی رنج می برند. هدف از مطالعه حاضر، تعیین تأثیر پیاده روی گروهی در طبیعت بر برخی شاخص های سلامت جسمی و کیفیت زندگی بیماران بستری مبتلا به اسکیزوفرنی بود. روش بررسی: در این مطالعه کارآزمایی بالینی، 62 بیمار مبتلا به اسکیزوفرنی مزمن بستری در بیمارستان روانپزشکی سینای شهر جونقان به صورت تصادفی در دو گروه کنترل (30 نفر) و مداخله (32 نفر) قرار گرفتند. گروه کنترل درمان روتین و گروه مداخله علاوه بر درمان روتین، در برنامه پیاده روی در طبیعت، هر روز صبح به مدت 90 دقیقه برای دو ماه شرکت کردند. در ابتدا و انتهای مطالعه، تری گلیسرید، کلسترول، قند خون ناشتا، شاخص توده بدنی و کیفیت زندگی در دو گروه ارزیابی و مقایسه شد. یافته ها: در ابتدای مطالعه، تفاوت معنی داری در میانگین کیفیت زندگی در دو گروه وجود نداشت (09/0P=)؛ اما پس از مداخله، کیفیت زندگی در گروه پیاده روی به شکل معنی داری ارتقاء یافت. میانگین نمره کلی کیفیت زندگی در گروه پیاده روی در ابتدای مطالعه 26/11±69/81 و در پایان مطالعه 93/10±62/77 بود (001/0

Unexpected Role of α-Fetoprotein in Spermatogenesis

BACKGROUND: Heat shock severely affects sperm production (spermatogenesis) and results in a rapid loss of haploid germ cells, or in other words, sperm formation (spermiogenesis) is inhibited. However, the mechanisms behind the effects of heat shock on spermatogenesis are obscure. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: To identify the inhibitory factor of spermiogenesis, experimental cryptorchid (EC) mice were used in this study. Here we show that α-fetoprotein (AFP) is specifically expressed in the testes of EC mice by proteome analysis. AFP was also specifically localized spermatocytes by immunohistochemical analysis and was secreted into the circulation system of EC mice by immunoblot analysis. Since spermatogenesis of an advanced mammal cannot be reproduced with in vitro, we performed the microinjection of AFP into the seminiferous tubules of normal mice to determine whether AFP inhibits spermiogenesis in vivo. AFP was directly responsible for the block in spermiogenesis of normal mice. To investigate whether AFP inhibits cell differentiation in other models, using EC mice we performed a partial hepatectomy (PH) that triggers a rapid regenerative response in the remnant liver tissue. We also found that liver regeneration is inhibited in EC mice with PH. The result suggests that AFP released into the blood of EC mice regulates liver regeneration by inhibiting the cell division of hepatocytes. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: AFP is a well-known cancer-specific marker, but AFP has no known function in healthy human beings. Our findings indicate that AFP expressed under EC conditions plays a role as a regulatory factor in spermatogenesis and in hepatic generation

Information retrieval and text mining technologies for chemistry

Efficient access to chemical information contained in scientific literature, patents, technical reports, or the web is a pressing need shared by researchers and patent attorneys from different chemical disciplines. Retrieval of important chemical information in most cases starts with finding relevant documents for a particular chemical compound or family. Targeted retrieval of chemical documents is closely connected to the automatic recognition of chemical entities in the text, which commonly involves the extraction of the entire list of chemicals mentioned in a document, including any associated information. In this Review, we provide a comprehensive and in-depth description of fundamental concepts, technical implementations, and current technologies for meeting these information demands. A strong focus is placed on community challenges addressing systems performance, more particularly CHEMDNER and CHEMDNER patents tasks of BioCreative IV and V, respectively. Considering the growing interest in the construction of automatically annotated chemical knowledge bases that integrate chemical information and biological data, cheminformatics approaches for mapping the extracted chemical names into chemical structures and their subsequent annotation together with text mining applications for linking chemistry with biological information are also presented. Finally, future trends and current challenges are highlighted as a roadmap proposal for research in this emerging field.A.V. and M.K. acknowledge funding from the European Community’s Horizon 2020 Program (project reference: 654021 - OpenMinted). M.K. additionally acknowledges the Encomienda MINETAD-CNIO as part of the Plan for the Advancement of Language Technology. O.R. and J.O. thank the Foundation for Applied Medical Research (FIMA), University of Navarra (Pamplona, Spain). This work was partially funded by Consellería de Cultura, Educación e Ordenación Universitaria (Xunta de Galicia), and FEDER (European Union), and the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) under the scope of the strategic funding of UID/BIO/04469/2013 unit and COMPETE 2020 (POCI-01-0145-FEDER-006684). We thank Iñigo Garciá -Yoldi for useful feedback and discussions during the preparation of the manuscript.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

On the use of quality diversity algorithms for the traveling thief problem

In real-world optimisation, it is common to face several sub-problems interacting and forming the main problem. There is an inter-dependency between the sub-problems, making it impossible to solve such a problem by focusing on only one component. The traveling thief problem (TTP) belongs to this category and is formed by the integration of the traveling salesperson problem (TSP) and the knapsack problem (KP). In this paper, we investigate the inter-dependency of the TSP and the KP by means of quality diversity (QD) approaches. QD algorithms provide a powerful tool not only to obtain high-quality solutions but also to illustrate the distribution of high-performing solutions in the behavioural space. We introduce a MAP-Elite based evolutionary algorithm using well-known TSP and KP search operators, taking the TSP and KP score as behavioural descriptor. Afterwards, we conduct comprehensive experimental studies that show the usefulness of using the QD approach applied to the TTP. First, we provide insights regarding high-quality TTP solutions in the TSP/KP behavioural space. Afterwards, we show that better solutions for the TTP can be obtained by using our QD approach and it can improve the best-known solution for a wide range of TTP instances used for benchmarking in the literature.Adel Nikfarjam, Aneta Neumann, Frank Neuman

On the use of quality diversity algorithms for the traveling thief problem

In real-world optimisation, it is common to face several sub-problems interacting and forming the main problem. There is an inter-dependency between the sub-problems, making it impossible to solve such a problem by focusing on only one component. The traveling thief problem (TTP) belongs to this category and is formed by the integration of the traveling salesperson problem (TSP) and the knapsack problem (KP). In this paper, we investigate the inter-dependency of the TSP and the KP by means of quality diversity (QD) approaches. QD algorithms provide a powerful tool not only to obtain high-quality solutions but also to illustrate the distribution of high-performing solutions in the behavioural space. We introduce a MAP-Elite based evolutionary algorithm using well-known TSP and KP search operators, taking the TSP and KP score as behavioural descriptor. Afterwards, we conduct comprehensive experimental studies that show the usefulness of using the QD approach applied to the TTP. First, we provide insights regarding high-quality TTP solutions in the TSP/KP behavioural space. Afterwards, we show that better solutions for the TTP can be obtained by using our QD approach and it can improve the best-known solution for a wide range of TTP instances used for benchmarking in the literature.Adel Nikfarjam, Aneta Neumann, Frank Neuman