Evidence Report: Risk of Decompression Sickness (DCS)

The Risk of Decompression Sickness (DCS) is identified by the NASA Human Research Program (HRP) as a recognized risk to human health and performance in space, as defined in the HRP Program Requirements Document (PRD). This Evidence Report provides a summary of the evidence that has been used to identify and characterize this risk. Given that tissue inert gas partial pressure is often greater than ambient pressure during phases of a mission, primarily during extravehicular activity (EVA), there is a possibility that decompression sickness may occur

Osseous changes following reverse total shoulder arthroplasty combined with latissimus dorsi transfer: a case series

Background: This is the first report on the incidence of proximal humerus osseous changes and associated clinical consequences in reverse total shoulder arthroplasty combined with a latissimus dorsi tendon transfer (RTSA+LDT). Methods: A multicenter, retrospective review identified all patients who had undergone a primary RTSA+LDT and had at least 3-month radiographic follow-up between 2012 and 2017. Data collection included demographics, oral steroid use, repair technique for LDT fixation, radiographic humeral osseous changes, complications, and need for revision surgery. Results: Twenty-four patients were included with an average age of 70.7 ± 7.9 years and follow-up of 16.3 (3-50) months. Ten patients (41.7%) developed osseous changes at the transfer location. There was no increased risk of developing osseous changes based on the surgical fixation technique (P = .421). Average time to earliest radiographic detection of osseous changes was 2.7 ± 1.7 months, with all changes occurring at or before 6 months. Two patients developed proximal humerus fractures, of which 1 had osseous changes through which the fracture occurred. Discussion: RTSA+LDT may place the proximal humeral cortex at greater risk than previously described. Using a long-stem prosthesis in the setting of RTSA+LDT may limit the consequences of this complication

Restoration of rotational invariance of bound states on the light front

We study bound states in a model with scalar nucleons interacting via an exchanged scalar meson using the Hamiltonian formalism on the light front. In this approach manifest rotational invariance is broken when the Fock space is truncated. By considering an effective Hamiltonian that takes into account two meson exchanges, we find that this breaking of rotational invariance is decreased from that which occurs when only one meson exchange is included. The best improvement occurs when the states are weakly bound.Comment: 20 pages, 6 figures, uses feynMF; changed typos, clarified use of angular momentu

Plasma and Serum Proteins Bound to Nanoceria: Insights into Pathways by which Nanoceria May Exert Its Beneficial and Deleterious Effects \u3cem\u3eIn Vivo\u3c/em\u3e

Nanoceria (CeO2, cerium oxide nanoparticles) is proposed as a therapeutic for multiple disorders. In blood, nanoceria becomes protein-coated, changing its surface properties to yield a different presentation to cells. There is little information on the interaction of nanoceria with blood proteins. The current study is the first to report the proteomics identification of plasma and serum proteins adsorbed to nanoceria. The results identify a number of plasma and serum proteins interacting with nanoceria, proteins whose normal activities regulate numerous cell functions: antioxidant/detoxification, energy regulation, lipoproteins, signaling, complement, immune function, coagulation, iron homeostasis, proteolysis, inflammation, protein folding, protease inhibition, adhesion, protein/RNA degradation, and hormonal. The principal implications of this study are: 1) The protein corona may positively or negatively affect nanoceria cellular uptake, subsequent organ bioprocessing, and effects; and 2) Nanoceria adsorption may alter protein structure and function, including pro- and inflammatory effects. Consequently, prior to their use as therapeutic agents, better understanding of the effects of nanoceria protein coating is warranted

Assessment of function and clinical utility of alcohol and other drug web sites: An observational, qualitative study

Background The increasing popularity and use of the internet makes it an attractive option for providing health information and treatment, including alcohol/other drug use. There is limited research examining how people identify and access information about alcohol or other drug (AOD) use online, or how they assess the usefulness of the information presented. This study examined the strategies that individuals used to identify and navigate a range of AOD websites, along with the attitudes concerning presentation and content. Methods Members of the general community in Brisbane and Roma (Queensland, Australia) were invited to participate in a 30-minute search of the internet for sites related to AOD use, followed by a focus group discussion. Fifty one subjects participated in the study across nine focus groups. Results Participants spent a maximum of 6.5 minutes on any one website, and less if the user was under 25 years of age. Time spent was as little as 2 minutes if the website was not the first accessed. Participants recommended that AOD-related websites should have an engaging home or index page, which quickly and accurately portrayed the site’s objectives, and provided clear site navigation options. Website content should clearly match the title and description of the site that is used by internet search engines. Participants supported the development of a portal for AOD websites, suggesting that it would greatly facilitate access and navigation. Treatment programs delivered online were initially viewed with caution. This appeared to be due to limited understanding of what constituted online treatment, including its potential efficacy. Conclusions A range of recommendations arise from this study regarding the design and development of websites, particularly those related to AOD use. These include prudent use of text and information on any one webpage, the use of graphics and colours, and clear, uncluttered navigation options. Implications for future website development are discussed

Silencing alanine transaminase 2 in diabetic liver attenuates hyperglycemia by reducing gluconeogenesis from amino acids

Hepatic gluconeogenesis from amino acids contributes significantly to diabetic hyperglycemia, but the molecular mechanisms involved are incompletely understood. Alanine transaminases (ALT1 and ALT2) catalyze the interconversion of alanine and pyruvate, which is required for gluconeogenesis from alanine. We find that ALT2 is overexpressed in the liver of diet-induced obese and db/db mice and that the expression of the gene encoding ALT2 (GPT2) is downregulated following bariatric surgery in people with obesity. The increased hepatic expression of Gpt2 in db/db liver is mediated by activating transcription factor 4, an endoplasmic reticulum stress-activated transcription factor. Hepatocyte-specific knockout of Gpt2 attenuates incorporation o

Large Scale Application of Neural Network Based Semantic Role Labeling for Automated Relation Extraction from Biomedical Texts

To reduce the increasing amount of time spent on literature search in the life sciences, several methods for automated knowledge extraction have been developed. Co-occurrence based approaches can deal with large text corpora like MEDLINE in an acceptable time but are not able to extract any specific type of semantic relation. Semantic relation extraction methods based on syntax trees, on the other hand, are computationally expensive and the interpretation of the generated trees is difficult. Several natural language processing (NLP) approaches for the biomedical domain exist focusing specifically on the detection of a limited set of relation types. For systems biology, generic approaches for the detection of a multitude of relation types which in addition are able to process large text corpora are needed but the number of systems meeting both requirements is very limited. We introduce the use of SENNA (“Semantic Extraction using a Neural Network Architecture”), a fast and accurate neural network based Semantic Role Labeling (SRL) program, for the large scale extraction of semantic relations from the biomedical literature. A comparison of processing times of SENNA and other SRL systems or syntactical parsers used in the biomedical domain revealed that SENNA is the fastest Proposition Bank (PropBank) conforming SRL program currently available. 89 million biomedical sentences were tagged with SENNA on a 100 node cluster within three days. The accuracy of the presented relation extraction approach was evaluated on two test sets of annotated sentences resulting in precision/recall values of 0.71/0.43. We show that the accuracy as well as processing speed of the proposed semantic relation extraction approach is sufficient for its large scale application on biomedical text. The proposed approach is highly generalizable regarding the supported relation types and appears to be especially suited for general-purpose, broad-scale text mining systems. The presented approach bridges the gap between fast, cooccurrence-based approaches lacking semantic relations and highly specialized and computationally demanding NLP approaches