Predictive factors of first-year mortality in newly diagnosed end-stage renal disease patients commencing on hemodialysis in Kelantan

BACKGROUND: Globally the number of End-stage renal disease (ESRD) patients has been increasing in trend both developed and developing countries, worldwide. The annual death rate for ESRD on hemodialysis (HD) in Malaysia 2015 was 13.8%. The overall 5 years and 10 years survival on dialysis were 52% and 27% respectively. The trend for death rate among HD patients had gradually increased over the past 2 decades. Dialysis has a massive impact on financial resources and utilization. The highest incidence of mortality is found to be during the first year of initiation of hemodialysis. Several studies have comprehensively analyzed various existing risk factors during the pre-dialysis stage associated with first-year mortality after commencing HD; however, the results were inconsistent due to lack of local data. This study was carried out to identify prognostic factors that contribute to the first-year mortality in newly diagnosed ESRD patients in the state of Kelantan, Malaysia. METHOD: A prospective cohort study was conducted involving 373 ESRD patients newly initiated hemodialysis from 28 hemodialysis center in Kelantan from 1st January 2016 to 31st December 2016. Follow up of one year after recruitment of the subjects was done until 31st December 2017. All patients who fulfilled the criteria were included in the study. The required information on variables of interest was taken every 3 months during blood taking and recorded in ADNAN (Advanced Dialysis Nephrology Application) system. The survival status until 31st December 2017 was recorded into a data collection form.RESULTS: The overall cumulative survival of ESRD during the first-year initiation on HD in Kelantan was 89.5 (95% CI 86.5, 92.7) percent. Based on Cox Proportional Hazards Regression multivariable analysis after adjusting other variables, the significant prognostic factors that influenced the risk of mortality in ESRD patients during first-year of initiation of hemodialysis were female gender (HR=2.40, 95% CI: 1.23, 4.69) and serum albumin less than 30 g/l (HR=0.93, 95% CI: 0.89, 0.98). CONCLUSION: The survival rate of ESRD patients during the first-year initiation of HD in Kelantan was comparable with other developed countries. Significant independent prognostic factors identified were considered similar to other countries

Modeling and Simulation of Spark Streaming

As more and more devices connect to Internet of Things, unbounded streams of data will be generated, which have to be processed "on the fly" in order to trigger automated actions and deliver real-time services. Spark Streaming is a popular realtime stream processing framework. To make efficient use of Spark Streaming and achieve stable stream processing, it requires a careful interplay between different parameter configurations. Mistakes may lead to significant resource overprovisioning and bad performance. To alleviate such issues, this paper develops an executable and configurable model named SSP (stands for Spark Streaming Processing) to model and simulate Spark Streaming. SSP is written in ABS, which is a formal, executable, and object-oriented language for modeling distributed systems by means of concurrent object groups. SSP allows users to rapidly evaluate and compare different parameter configurations without deploying their applications on a cluster/cloud. The simulation results show that SSP is able to mimic Spark Streaming in different scenarios.Comment: 7 pages and 13 figures. This paper is published in IEEE 32nd International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications (AINA 2018

Boston Hospitality Review: Fall 2017

Table of contents: Design: A Place for Everything and Everything in Its Place: The Application of Feng Shui to Hotels by Ingrid Y. Lin -- Sharing Economy: The hotel industry’s Achilles Heel? Quantifying the negative impacts of Airbnb on Boston’s hotel performance by Makarand Mody, Courtney Suess-Raeisinafchi, and Tarik Dogru -- History: Fragments of the Past: The Exchange Buffet, Building a Business on Trust for 78 Years by Dr. Peter Szende and Jeanne Pak -- Theory: “The Six Touchstones” A Model for Hospitality Students by Christopher C. Muller and Michael Oshins -- Hotels: A (Diamond) Cut Above the Rest: Improving Hotel Operations Based on TripAdvisor Rating Attributes by Suzanne Markham BagneraTable of contents: Design: A Place for Everything and Everything in Its Place: The Application of Feng Shui to Hotels by Ingrid Y. Lin -- Sharing Economy: The hotel industry’s Achilles Heel? Quantifying the negative impacts of Airbnb on Boston’s hotel performance by Makarand Mody, Courtney Suess-Raeisinafchi, and Tarik Dogru -- History: Fragments of the Past: The Exchange Buffet, Building a Business on Trust for 78 Years by Dr. Peter Szende and Jeanne Pak -- Theory: “The Six Touchstones” A Model for Hospitality Students by Christopher C. Muller and Michael Oshins -- Hotels: A (Diamond) Cut Above the Rest: Improving Hotel Operations Based on TripAdvisor Rating Attributes by Suzanne Markham Bagner

Is Dispositional Self-Compassion Associated With Psychophysiological Flexibility Beyond Mindfulness? An Exploratory Pilot Study

Background: Dispositional mindfulness and self-compassion are shown to associate with less self-reported emotional distress. However, previous studies have indicated that dispositional self-compassion may be an even more important buffer against such distress than dispositional mindfulness. To our knowledge, no study has yet disentangled the relationship between dispositional self-compassion and mindfulness and level of psychophysiological flexibility as measured with vagally mediated heart rate variability (vmHRV). The aim was thus to provide a first exploratory effort to expand previous research relying on self-report measures by including a psychophysiological measure indicative of emotional stress reactivity. Methods: Fifty-three university students filled out the “Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire” (FFMQ) and the “Self-Compassion Scale” (SCS), and their heart rate was measured during a 5 min resting electrocardiogram. Linear hierarchical regression analyses were conducted to examine the common and unique variance explained by the total scores of the FFMQ and the SCS on level of resting vmHRV. Results: Higher SCS total scores associated significantly with higher levels of vmHRV also when controlling for the FFMQ total scores. The SCS uniquely explained 7% of the vmHRV. The FFMQ total scores did not associate with level of vmHRV. Conclusion: These results offer preliminary support that dispositional self-compassion associates with better psychophysiological regulation of emotional arousal above and beyond mindfulness.publishedVersio

Rheumatoid arthritis, item response theory, Blom transformation, and mixed models

We studied rheumatoid arthritis (RA) in the North American Rheumatoid Arthritis Consortium (NARAC) data (1499 subjects; 757 families). Identical methods were applied for studying RA in the Genetic Analysis Workshop 15 (GAW15) simulated data (with a prior knowledge of the simulation answers). Fifty replications of GAW15 simulated data had 3497 ± 20 subjects in 1500 nuclear families. Two new statistical methods were applied to transform the original phenotypes on these data, the item response theory (IRT) to create a latent variable from nine classifying predictors and a Blom transformation of the anti-CCP (anti-cyclic citrinullated protein) variable. We performed linear mixed-effects (LME) models to study the additive associations of 404 Illumina-genotyped single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) on the NARAC data, and of 17,820 SNPs of the GAW15 simulated data. In the GAW15 simulated data, the association with anti-CCP Blom transformation showed a 100% sensitivity for SNP1 located in the major histocompatibility complex gene. In contrast, the association of SNP1 with the IRT latent variable showed only 24% sensitivity. From the simulated data, we conclude that the Blom transformation of the anti-CCP variable produced more reliable results than the latent variable from the qualitative combination of a group of RA risk factors. In the NARAC data, the significant RA-SNPs associations found with both phenotype-transformation methods provided a trend that may point toward dynein and energy control genes. Finer genotyping in the NARAC data would grant more exact evidence for the contributions of chromosome 6 to RA

Binding of the angiogenic/senescence inducer CCN1/CYR61 to integrin α6β1 drives endocrine resistance in breast cancer cells

CCN1/CYR61 promotes angiogenesis, tumor growth and chemoresistance by binding to its integrin receptor αvβ3 in endothelial and breast cancer (BC) cells. CCN1 controls also tissue regeneration by engaging its integrin receptorα6β1 to induce fibroblast senescence. Here, we explored if the ability of CCN1 to drive an endocrine resistancephenotype in estrogen receptor-positive BC cells relies on interactions with either αvβ3 or α6β1. First, we tookadvantage of site-specific mutagenesis abolishing the CCN1 receptor-binding sites to αvβ3 and α6β1 to determine theintegrin partner responsible for CCN1-driven endocrine resistance. Second, we explored a putative nuclear role ofCCN1 in regulating ERα-driven transcriptional responses. Retroviral forced expression of a CCN1 derivative with asingle amino acid change (D125A) that abrogates binding to αvβ3 partially phenocopied the endocrine resistancephenotype induced upon overexpression of wild-type (WT) CCN1. Forced expression of the CCN1 mutant TM,which abrogates all the T1, H1, and H2 binding sites to α6β1, failed to bypass the estrogen requirement foranchorage-independent growth or to promote resistance to tamoxifen. Wild-type CCN1 promoted estradiol-independent transcriptional activity of ERα and enhanced ERα agonist response to tamoxifen. The α6β1-binding-defective TM-CCN1 mutant lost the ERα co-activator-like behavior of WT-CCN1. Co-immunoprecipitation assaysrevealed a direct interaction between endogenous CCN1 and ERα, and in vitro approaches confirmed the ability ofrecombinant CCN1 to bind ERα. CCN1 signaling via α6β1, but not via αvβ3, drives an endocrine resistance phenotypethat involves a direct binding of CCN1 to ERα to regulate itstranscriptional activity in ER+ BC cells.Fil: Espinoza, Ingrid. University of Mississippi; Estados Unidos. Mayo Clinic ; Estados UnidosFil: Yang, Lin. Mayo Clinic ; Estados UnidosFil: Steen, Travis Vander. Mayo Clinic ; Estados UnidosFil: Vellón, Luciano. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Instituto de Biología y Medicina Experimental. Fundación de Instituto de Biología y Medicina Experimental. Instituto de Biología y Medicina Experimental; ArgentinaFil: Cuyàs, Elisabet. Institut D`investigació Biomedica de Girona Dr. Josep Trueta (idib`gi); EspañaFil: Verdura, Sara. Institut D`investigació Biomedica de Girona Dr. Josep Trueta (idib`gi); EspañaFil: Lau, Lester. Institut D`investigació Biomedica de Girona Dr. Josep Trueta (idib`gi); España. University of Illinois; Estados UnidosFil: Menendez, Javier A.. Institut D`investigació Biomedica de Girona Dr. Josep Trueta (idib`gi); EspañaFil: Lupu, Ruth. Institut D`investigació Biomedica de Girona Dr. Josep Trueta (idib`gi); Españ

Proving ligand structure-reactivity correlation on multinuclear copper electrocatalysts supported on carbon black for the oxygen reduction reaction

Bioinspired transition-metal catalysts seek to mimic the specific active site of metalloenzymes, as the multicopper oxidase, that can efficiently reduce dioxygen to water via a complete 4-electrons mechanism at low overpotential. However, the multicopper oxidase enzymes lack stability under operando conditions, hampering their application in fuel cell electrodes. Bioinspired multicopper catalysts present a remarkable electrocatalytic activity for the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR), where the structure and electronic properties of the ligands play a fundamental role. In this work, we explore the instantaneous catalytic activity and its evolution under operando conditions of two multicopper catalysts with different ligand flexibility, pyridyl ligand (CuL1), and pyridylmethyl ligand (CuL2), by conventional electrochemical techniques and scanning electrochemical microscopy (SECM). Both catalysts present similar instantaneous electrocatalytic activity with no significant role of the ligand, but there is a change in the mechanism. While the rigidity of CuL1 reduces the dioxygen via direct 4e-, the catalyst with higher flexibility (CuL2) follows a 2e−x 2e− mechanism. The production of H2O2 as ORR byproduct evaluated by rotating ring-disk electrode (RRDE) and stability test evaluated under ORR operating conditions by SECM imaging of both catalysts demonstrated a higher decrease in catalytic activity and higher H2O2 production in CuL2 than in CuL1, which evidences a ligand structure-reactivity correlation. These results contribute to the rational design of next generation of copper catalysts and open the door to a new methodology to evaluate the activity evolution under operando conditions by SECMThis work has been supported by ECOS Sud-Chile CONICYT program (Project C17E10/170037), FONDECYT Project 1161117, FONDECYT Project 11221073, FONDECYT Postdoctoral Project 3170330, and ACT192175

RECTANGLE: A Bit-slice Lightweight Block Cipher Suitable for Multiple Platforms

In this paper, we propose a new lightweight block cipher named RECTANGLE. The main idea of the design of RECTANGLE is to allow lightweight and fast implementations using bit-slice techniques. RECTANGLE uses an SP-network. The substitution layer consists of 16 4 x 4 S-boxes in parallel. The permutation layer is composed of 3 rotations. As shown in this paper, RECTANGLE offers great performance in both hardware and software environment, which provides enough flexibility for different application scenario. The following are 3 main advantages of RECTANGLE. First, RECTANGLE is extremely hardware-friendly. For the 80-bit key version, a one-cycle-per-round parallel implementation only needs 1600 gates for a throughput of 246 Kbits/sec at 100 KHz clock and an energy efficiency of 3.0 pJ/bit. Second, RECTANGLE achieves a very competitive software speed among the existing lightweight block ciphers due to its bit-slice style. Using 128-bit SSE instructions, a bit-slice implementation of RECTANGLE reaches an average encryption speed of about 3.9 cycles/byte for messages around 3000 bytes. Last, but not least, we propose new design criteria for the RECTANGLE S-box. Due to our careful selection of the S-box and the asymmetric design of the permutation layer, RECTANGLE achieves a very good security-performance tradeoff. Our extensive and deep security analysis shows that the highest number of rounds that we can attack, is 18 (out of 25)