Holding Death at Bay vs. Prolonging Life: Indexing Fatalism and Optimism in the Ideology of Health, Genetics, and Family History in the U. S. and South Korean Media

Media discourse creates and shapes views of personhood, of possibilities, of wellness, and at the same time, these views and beliefs, in their turn, shape media discourse. Broadcasts of health-related edutainment programs and advertisements are rich sources for the discovery of stances concerning health and illness. We examine media discourse in the United States and South Korea, and uncover consistent indexical patterns pointing to overall ideologies of fatalism in the U.S. and optimism in South Korea. Specifically, from an indexicality-based perspective, we identify the patterned ways in which the ideologies of fatalism and optimism are indexed with regard to agency and stance. We provide evidence of the culturally distinct patterns of discourse that construct health and illness in the U.S. and South Korean media. In the U.S., heart disease and cancer are threats, medicines are omnipotent, and physicians, omniscient. “Death” is explicit and medicines and physicians hold it at bay. Korean discourse frames “life” as explicit underscoring efforts by doctors and medicines to prolong and enhance it. Implications associated with public health discourses employing diverse discursive strategies are discussed

Transthyretin Stimulates Tumor Growth through Regulation of Tumor, Immune, and Endothelial Cells

Early detection of lung cancer offers an important opportunity to decrease mortality while it is still treatable and curable. Thirteen secretory proteins that are Stat3 downstream gene products were identified as a panel of biomarkers for lung cancer detection in human sera. This panel of biomarkers potentially differentiates different types of lung cancer for classification. Among them, the transthyretin (TTR) concentration was highly increased in human serum of lung cancer patients. TTR concentration was also induced in the serum, bronchoalveolar lavage fluid, alveolar type II epithelial cells, and alveolar myeloid cells of the CCSP-rtTA/(tetO)7-Stat3C lung tumor mouse model. Recombinant TTR stimulated lung tumor cell proliferation and growth, which were mediated by activation of mitogenic and oncogenic molecules. TTR possesses cytokine functions to stimulate myeloid cell differentiation, which are known to play roles in tumor environment. Further analyses showed that TTR treatment enhanced the reactive oxygen species production in myeloid cells and enabled them to become functional myeloid-derived suppressive cells. TTR demonstrated a great influence on a wide spectrum of endothelial cell functions to control tumor and immune cell migration and infiltration. TTR-treated endothelial cells suppressed T cell proliferation. Taken together, these 13 Stat3 downstream inducible secretory protein biomarkers potentially can be used for lung cancer diagnosis, classification, and as clinical targets for lung cancer personalized treatment if their expression levels are increased in a given lung cancer patient in the blood

Accounting Profession in Hong Kong; Professional Accounting in Foreign Country Series

https://egrove.olemiss.edu/aicpa_guides/1679/thumbnail.jp

Sentinel surveillance of HIV-1 transmitted drug resistance, acute infection and recent infection.

BackgroundHIV-1 acute infection, recent infection and transmitted drug resistance screening was integrated into voluntary HIV counseling and testing (VCT) services to enhance the existing surveillance program in San Francisco. This study describes newly-diagnosed HIV cases and characterizes correlates associated with infection.Methodology/principal findingsA consecutive sample of persons presenting for HIV VCT at the municipal sexually transmitted infections (STI) clinic from 2004 to 2006 (N = 9,868) were evaluated by standard enzyme-linked immunoassays (EIA). HIV antibody-positive specimens were characterized as recent infections using a less-sensitive EIA. HIV-RNA pooled testing was performed on HIV antibody-negative specimens to identify acute infections. HIV antibody-positive and acute infection specimens were evaluated for drug resistance by sequence analysis. Multivariable logistic regression was performed to evaluate associations. The 380 newly-diagnosed HIV cases included 29 acute infections, 128 recent infections, and 47 drug-resistant cases, with no significant increases or decreases in prevalence over the three years studied. HIV-1 transmitted drug resistance prevalence was 11.0% in 2004, 13.4% in 2005 and 14.9% in 2006 (p = 0.36). Resistance to non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors (NNRTI) was the most common pattern detected, present in 28 cases of resistance (59.6%). Among MSM, recent infection was associated with amphetamine use (AOR = 2.67; p<0.001), unprotected anal intercourse (AOR = 2.27; p<0.001), sex with a known HIV-infected partner (AOR = 1.64; p = 0.02), and history of gonorrhea (AOR = 1.62; p = 0.03).ConclusionsNew HIV diagnoses, recent infections, acute infections and transmitted drug resistance prevalence remained stable between 2004 and 2006. Resistance to NNRTI comprised more than half of the drug-resistant cases, a worrisome finding given its role as the backbone of first-line antiretroviral therapy in San Francisco as well as worldwide. The integration of HIV-1 drug resistance, recent infection, and acute infection testing should be considered for existing HIV/STI surveillance and prevention activities, particularly in an era of enhanced efforts for early diagnosis and treatment

Mini-chromosome maintenance complexes form a filament to remodel DNA structure and topology.

Deregulation of mini-chromosome maintenance (MCM) proteins is associated with genomic instability and cancer. MCM complexes are recruited to replication origins for genome duplication. Paradoxically, MCM proteins are in excess than the number of origins and are associated with chromatin regions away from the origins during G1 and S phases. Here, we report an unusually wide left-handed filament structure for an archaeal MCM, as determined by X-ray and electron microscopy. The crystal structure reveals that an α-helix bundle formed between two neighboring subunits plays a critical role in filament formation. The filament has a remarkably strong electro-positive surface spiraling along the inner filament channel for DNA binding. We show that this MCM filament binding to DNA causes dramatic DNA topology change. This newly identified function of MCM to change DNA topology may imply a wider functional role for MCM in DNA metabolisms beyond helicase function. Finally, using yeast genetics, we show that the inter-subunit interactions, important for MCM filament formation, play a role for cell growth and survival

The interference effect of concurrent working memory task on visual inhibitory control

We examined the interference between inhibitory control of a saccadic eye movement and a working memory task. This study was motivated by the observation that people are suscep-tible to cognitive errors when they are preoccupied. Subjects were instructed to make an anti-saccade, or to look in the opposite direction of a visual stimulus, thereby exercising inhibito-ry control over the reflexive eye movement towards a salient object. At the same time, the subjects were instructed to memorize a random sequence of digits that were read out to them, thereby engaging their working memory. We measured the success of an eye movement by rapidly switching between images and asking the subjects what they saw. We found that these concurrent cognitive tasks significantly degraded anti-saccade performance.We examined the interference between inhibitory control of a saccadic eye movement and a working memory task. This study was motivated by the observation that people are susceptible to cognitive errors when they are preoccupied. Subjects were instructed to make an anti-saccade, or to look in the opposite direction of a visual stimulus, thereby exercising inhibitory control over the reflexive eye movement towards a salient object. At the same time, the subjects were instructed to memorize a random sequence of digits that were read out to them, thereby engaging their working memory. We measured the success of an eye movement by rapidly switching between images and asking the subjects what they saw. We found that these concurrent cognitive tasks significantly degraded anti-saccade performance

Homeless Service Utilization Report: Hawai‘i 2015

The 2015 Homeless Service Utilization Report is the tenth annual report produced by the Center on the Family at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa and the Homeless Program Office in the Hawai‘i State Department of Human Services. In this report, references to the FY 2014 data are based on the 2014 Homeless Service Utilization Report and its Statistical Supplement, which can be downloaded from http://uhfamily.hawaii.edu/publications/list.aspx. Additional data tables and thematic maps are published in the 2015 Statistical Supplement, which is available from the web address above

The biomedical discourse relation bank

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Identification of discourse relations, such as causal and contrastive relations, between situations mentioned in text is an important task for biomedical text-mining. A biomedical text corpus annotated with discourse relations would be very useful for developing and evaluating methods for biomedical discourse processing. However, little effort has been made to develop such an annotated resource.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We have developed the Biomedical Discourse Relation Bank (BioDRB), in which we have annotated explicit and implicit discourse relations in 24 open-access full-text biomedical articles from the GENIA corpus. Guidelines for the annotation were adapted from the Penn Discourse TreeBank (PDTB), which has discourse relations annotated over open-domain news articles. We introduced new conventions and modifications to the sense classification. We report reliable inter-annotator agreement of over 80% for all sub-tasks. Experiments for identifying the sense of explicit discourse connectives show the connective itself as a highly reliable indicator for coarse sense classification (accuracy 90.9% and F1 score 0.89). These results are comparable to results obtained with the same classifier on the PDTB data. With more refined sense classification, there is degradation in performance (accuracy 69.2% and F1 score 0.28), mainly due to sparsity in the data. The size of the corpus was found to be sufficient for identifying the sense of explicit connectives, with classifier performance stabilizing at about 1900 training instances. Finally, the classifier performs poorly when trained on PDTB and tested on BioDRB (accuracy 54.5% and F1 score 0.57).</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Our work shows that discourse relations can be reliably annotated in biomedical text. Coarse sense disambiguation of explicit connectives can be done with high reliability by using just the connective as a feature, but more refined sense classification requires either richer features or more annotated data. The poor performance of a classifier trained in the open domain and tested in the biomedical domain suggests significant differences in the semantic usage of connectives across these domains, and provides robust evidence for a biomedical sublanguage for discourse and the need to develop a specialized biomedical discourse annotated corpus. The results of our cross-domain experiments are consistent with related work on identifying connectives in BioDRB.</p

Pemetrexed in combination with cisplatin versus cisplatin monotherapy in E ast A sian patients with recurrent or metastatic head and neck cancer: Results of an exploratory subgroup analysis of a phase III trial

Aim: An exploratory subgroup analysis of E ast A sian ( EA ) patients in a phase III trial was conducted to assess efficacy and safety trends based on ethnicity. Methods: The 795 patients with recurrent or metastatic squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck included 111 EA patients randomized to pemetrexed‐cisplatin ( n  = 55) and placebo‐cisplatin ( n  = 56) and 684 non‐ EA patients randomized to pemetrexed‐cisplatin ( n  = 343) and placebo‐cisplatin ( n  = 341). Treatment differences in median overall survival and progression‐free survival were compared using a stratified log–rank test. Survival was estimated using the K aplan– M eier method. Results: The median overall survival in the pemetrexed‐cisplatin and placebo‐cisplatin arms of the EA group (6.8 and 5.7 months, respectively [ P  = 0.275]) was similar to that in the global population (7.3 and 6.3 months, respectively [ P  = 0.082]); the median progression‐free survival in the pemetrexed‐cisplatin and placebo‐cisplatin arms in the EA group (2.8 and 1.9 months, respectively [ P  = 0.748]) was similar to that in the global population (3.6 and 2.8 months, respectively [ P  = 0.166]). Compared to the findings in the global population, overall survival for the EA group receiving prior platinum‐based therapy was longer ( P  = 0.042 vs P  = 0.065). There was no significant interaction between treatment arms and ethnicity. Conclusion: Consistent with findings in the global population, pemetrexed‐cisplatin did not improve survival compared with placebo‐cisplatin for the EA group . However, in a subgroup analysis, pemetrexed‐cisplatin showed an overall survival advantage in EA patients receiving prior platinum‐based therapy.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/101808/1/ajco12060.pd