Exploring views on satisfaction with life in young children with chronic illness: an innovative approach to the collection of self-report data from children under 11

The objective of this study was to explore young children’s views on the impact of chronic illness on their life in order to inform future development of a patient-based self-report health outcome measure. We describe an approach to facilitating self-report views from young children with chronic illness. A board game was designed in order to obtain qualitative data from 39 children with a range of chronic illness conditions and 38 healthy controls ranging in age from 3 to 11 years. The format was effective in engaging young children in a self-report process of determining satisfaction with life and identified nine domains. The board game enabled children aged 5–11 years with chronic illness to describe the effects of living with illness on home, family, friends, school and life in general. It generated direct, non-interpreted material from children who, because of their age, may have been considered unable or limited their ability to discuss and describe how they feel. Obtaining this information for children aged 4 and under continues to be a challenge

Thromboinflammatory changes in plasma proteome of pregnant women with PCOS detected by quantitative label-free proteomics

Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) is the most common endocrinological disorder of fertile-aged women. Several adverse pregnancy outcomes and abnormalities of the placenta have been associated with PCOS. By using quantitative label-free proteomics we investigated whether changes in the plasma proteome of pregnant women with PCOS could elucidate the mechanisms behind the pathologies observed in PCOS pregnancies. A total of 169 proteins with >= 2 unique peptides were detected to be differentially expressed between women with PCOS (n = 7) and matched controls (n = 20) at term of pregnancy, out of which 35 were significant (p-value <0.05). A pathway analysis revealed that networks related to humoral immune responses, inflammatory responses, cardiovascular disease and cellular growth and proliferation were affected by PCOS. Classification of cases and controls was carried out using principal component analysis, orthogonal projections on latent structure-discriminant analysis (OPLS-DA), hierarchical clustering, self-organising maps and ROC-curve analysis. The most significantly enriched proteins in PCOS were properdin and insulin-like growth factor II. In the dataset, properdin had the best predictive accuracy for PCOS (AUC=1). Additionally, properdin abundances correlated with AMH levels in pregnant women.Peer reviewe

Fabrication and Characterization of Graphene-Barium Titanate-Graphene layered capacitors by spin coating at low processing temperatures

Barium titanate, BaTiO3 (BT), materials have been synthesized by two different routes: one ball-mill-derived (BMD) nanopowder and another precursor-derived (PCD) BT synthesis method were used separately to fabricate BT thin films on stainless steel (SS) and quartz substrates by spin coating. Then thin films from both synthesis routes were characterized by Ultraviolet-Visible-Near Infrared (UV-Vis-NIR) Spectroscopy, Field-Emission Scanning Electron Microscopy (FE-SEM), X-ray Diffractometry (XRD), Raman Spectroscopy, and Four-point collinear probe; all carried out at room temperature. Our studies revealed that the PCD synthesis process did not produce the BT phase even under the 900^0C air-annealing condition. In contrast, a homogeneous BT thin film has been formed from the BMD-BT nanopowder. The optical band gap of BMD-BT thin films was found in the 3.10 - 3.28 eV range. Finally, a Graphene-Barium Titanate-Graphene (G-BT-G) structure was fabricated on a SS substrate by spin coating at processing temperatures below 100^0C and characterized by two different pieces of equipment: a Potentiostat/Galvanostat (PG-STAT) and a Precision Impedance Analyzer (PIA). The G-BT-G structure exhibited a capacitance of 8 nF and 7.15 nF, a highest dielectric constant of 800 and 790, and a low dielectric loss of 4.5 and 5, investigated by PG-STAT and PIA equipment, respectively.Comment: 25 pages, 11 Figure

Growth performance, cytokine expression, and immune responses of broiler chickens fed a dietary palm oil and sunflower oil blend supplemented with L-Arginine and varying concentrations of vitamin E

Usually, people will search on the Internet for movie that they want to watch. However, it is tedious to find and choose movie that matched with their preferences due to a lot of information on the Internet. Therefore, most of the movie portals are adopting recommendation engine to filter and display user’s personalized content. In this paper, MyRecMovie is presented to recommend movies by using graph-powered recommendation engine. MyRecMovie adopts content based (CB) and collaborative filtering (CF) approaches with then further enhance the recommendations with graph-powered recommendation engine to provide movie recommendations to the user

Reliable early breast cancer detection using artificial neural network for small data set

This paper proposes a breast cancer detection module using Artificial Neural Network for small data set. The developed system consists of hardware and software. Hardware included UWB transceiver and a pair of home- made directional sensor/antenna. The software included a Graphical User Interface (GUI) and k-fold based feed-forward back propagation Neural Network module to detect the tumor existence, size and location along with soft interface between software and hardware. Forward scattering technique is used by placing two sensors diagonally opposite sides of a breast phantom. UWB pulses are transmitted from one side of phantom and received from other side, controlled by the software interface in PC environment. Firstly feed forward backpropagation neural network (FFBNN) is developed. Then, k-fold is combined with developed FFBNN for testing purpose. Four data sets are created where contains 125, 95, 65 and 30 data samples in 1st,2nd,3rd and 4th data set respectively. Collected received signals were then fed into the NN module for training, testing and validation. The process is done for all data sets separately. The system exhibits detection efficiency of tumor existence, location (x, y, z), and size were approximately 87.72%, 87.24%, 83.93% and 80.51% for 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th data set respectively. The proposed module is very practical with low-cost and user friendly. The developed breast cancer detection module can be used for large data samples as well as for minimum data samples

An efficient antioxidant system and heavy metal exclusion from leaves make Solanum cheesmaniae more tolerant to Cu than its cultivated counterpart

Copper (Cu) is an abundant metal in the environment coming from anthropogenic activities and natural sources that, in excess, easily becomes phytotoxic to most species, being its accumulation in plants considered an environmental threat. This study aimed to compare the physiological and molecular responses of Solanum lycopersicum and its wild counterpart Solanum cheesmaniae to Cu stress. In particular, we wanted to address the hypothesis that S. cheesmaniae is more adapted to Cu stress than S. lycopersicum, since the former is equipped with a more efficient antioxidant defense system than the latter. Biomarkers of oxidative status (lipid peroxidation, hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) and superoxide anion (O.− 2 ) levels) revealed a more pronounced imbalance in the redox homeostasis in shoots of S. lycopersicum than in S. cheesmaniae in response to Cu. Furthermore, the activity of key antioxidant enzymes clearly differed in both species in response to Cu. Catalase (CAT) activity increased in S. cheesmaniae shoots but decreased in the domestic species, as well as ascorbate peroxidase (APX). Both species preferentially accumulated Cu in the radicular system, although a great increase in the aerial parts of S. lycopersicum was measured, while in leaves of Cu- treated S. cheesmaniae, the levels of Cu were not changed. Overall, results validated the hypothesis that S. cheesmaniae is more tolerant to excess Cu than S. lycopersicum and the data provided will help the development of breeding strategies toward the improvement of the resistance/tolerance of cultivated tomato species to heavy metal stress.This research was partially supported by national funds provided by Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) through PEst-OE/BIA/UI4046/2014 (FCT through BioISI) and through the research project PTDC/ AGR-PRO/7028/2014.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio