Anatomical and functional changes in the lower urinary tract during pregnancy

Objective To assess the prevalence and the development of urinary incontinence in nulliparous pregnant women, both subjectively and objectively, and to investigate the relation of incontinence with the mobility of the urethro-vesical junction measured by perineal ultrasound. Design A prospective longitudinal study. Setting University Hospital and Martini Hospital Groningen, the Netherlands. Population A cohort of 117 nulliparous pregnant women and 27 nulliparous non-pregnant controls. Methods Urinary incontinence was measured by a questionnaire and by a 24-hour pad test. The position of the urethro-vesical junction and its mobility were measured by perineal ultrasound. Main outcome measure Prevalence of urinary incontinence; mobility of the urethro-vesical junction, indicated by the displacement/pressure coefficient. Results Up to 35% of the women reported urinary incontinence in pregnancy, and 20% of the women had a positive pad test. The angle of the urethro-vesical junction angle at rest and the displacement/pressure coefficient during coughing showed a significant increasing trend during pregnancy, but no changes were seen during the Valsalva manoeuvre. No relationship was found between subjective and objective incontinence data and the position and mobility of the urethro-vesical junction. Conclusion The prevalence of incontinence in nulliparous women as found by the pad test was significantly higher in pregnancy (20%) than in the non-pregnant control group (4%). Perineal ultrasound of the urethrovesical junction showed lowering of the pelvic floor occurring as early as 12-16 weeks of pregnancy. Serial measurements of the displacement/pressure coefficient suggest that the dynamic characteristics of the connective tissues of the pelvic floor remain unaltered,whereas a significant decrease in pelvic floor muscle contraction occurs. Since no relation was found between measurements of the urethro-vesical junction and incontinence, urinary incontinence in pregnancy is most likely explained by other factors

The effect of estus synchronization treatment on somatic cell count of transitional-anestrus local-Damascus cross breed goats' milk

An experiment was conducted to examine the effect of estrus synchronization protocols and steroid hormones concentrations on somatic cell count (SCC) of transitional-anestrus local-Damascus cross goats’ milk. Fifty-six goats (2–4-year old) were randomly assigned to three groups: fluorogestone acetate (FGA, n = 19), FGA-Prostaglandin (FGA-PGF, n = 19) and control (n = 18) groups. Intravaginal sponge containing 40 mg FGA was inserted for 13 days and an injection of 600 IU equine chorionic gonadotropin (eCG) was administered for goats of FGA and FGA-PGF groups at the time of sponge removal (day 0). In addition, goats of FGA-PGF group were injected with 10 mg dinoprost tromethamine (PGF₂α) on day 0. Five fertile local-Damascus cross bucks were turned-in with all goats on day 0. Blood and milk samples were collected from all goats on days -13 (beginning of experiment), -6, 0, 1, 2, 7, 13 and 20 (end of the experiment). Four-year old and second-parity goats had significantly higher (p < 0.05) SCC of both udder halves than 2- and 3-year old and first-parity goats, respectively. There was a significant effect (p < 0.05) for treatment and number of kids born in the last kidding season on SCC of both udder halves. Neither estradiol nor progesterone concentrations were correlated with SCC in goats in this experiment. The SCC of both udder halves and left udder halves in goats of the control and FGA groups, respectively, increased significantly (p < 0.05) after sponge removal and buck introduction when compared with day 0, with no differences in the FGA-PGF group. This increase in SCC of the control and FGA groups coincided with peak estrus behavior. However, SCC was far below the upper limit of the current standard for normal milk. In conclusion, induction of estrus with progestagen based programs and buck introduction may cause temporary significant increase in SCC. However, the SCC values during this period of temporary increase were still in the range of acceptable values for normal milk. With the current standards for SCC of 1,000,000/ml as legal limit for abnormal milk control programs in goats, estrus synchronization programs and the estrus status should not be considered when bulk-tank milk SCC is being investigated.A. Q. Talafha, S. Q. Lafi, M. M. Ababne

The effect of estrus synchronization treatments on somatic cell count of transitional-anestrus Awassi ewes' milk

Fifty-three transitional-anestrus Awassi ewes, randomly assigned to three groups: fluorogestone acetate (FGA, n = 18), FGA-Prostaglandin (FGA-PGF, n = 18) and control (n = 17), were used to examine the effect of estrus synchronization protocols and steroid hormones concentrations on milk somatic cell count (SCC). Intravaginal FGA sponge was inserted for 13 days and 600 IU equine chorionic gonadotropin was administered for ewes of FGA and FGA-PGF groups at the time of sponge removal (day 0). In addition, 10 mg was administered to ewes of FGA-PGF group on day 0. Blood and milk samples were collected from all ewes on days -13, -6, 0, 1, 2, 7 and 14. Estradiol had significant positive correlation with the SCC during the periods of sponge insertion (P = 0.015, r = 0.235) and within two days (P = 0.063 r = 0.23) after sponge removal with no correlation with SCC of both udder halves during the luteal phase. Progesterone concentrations, on the other hand, had a significant positive correlation (P < 0.001; r = 0.420) with the SCC of both udder halves during the luteal phase of the experiment, but not during the periods of sponge insertion and expected estrus. SCC returned under the influence of endogenous progesterone on days 7 and 14 to pre-synchronization values. In conclusion, sheep milk SCC is affected significantly with induction of estrus and steroid hormones concentrations. However, peak SCC recorded during estrus was far below the upper limit of the current standard for normal milk. With the current standards for SCC of 1,000,000/ml as legal limit for abnormal milk control programs in sheep, estrus synchronization programs and the estrus status should not be considered when bulk-tank milk SCC is being investigated, but should be considered during the process of setting new standards.A. Q. Talafha, S. Q. Lafi, M. M. Ababne

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical science. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press