Attitudes Concerning Postmortem Organ Donation : A Multicenter Survey in Various German Cohorts

BACKGROUND The aim of this study was to characterize postmortem organ donation attitudes in various German cohorts. MATERIAL AND METHODS Employees of 2 German cities and 2 German university hospitals, employees of a German automobile enterprise, and members of a German Medical Society were administered a questionnaire about postmortem organ and tissue donation attitudes. Demographic data and general attitudes were questioned and focused on: I) willingness to donate organs, II) holding a donor card, and III) having discussed the topic with the family. RESULTS Of 5291 participants, 65.2% reported favoring postmortem organ donation. Missing negative experiences, the idea that donation is helpful, a non-medical professional environment, excellent general health, gender, agreement with the brain-death paradigm, and age significantly influenced the participants’ attitudes. Participants were more likely to possess donor cards and had discussed more often with family members if they agreed with the brain-death paradigm and considered donation to be helpful. Males and older participants were the most likely to neglect donor cards, and Catholics, Protestants, and participants with poor health were the least likely to donate organs. Interest in receiving more information was expressed by 38.1% and 50.6% of participants refusing donation of all or of specific organs, respectively, and suggested the internet (60.0%) and family doctors (35.0%) as preferred sources of information. CONCLUSIONS Public campaigns in Germany should focus on males and older people as regards donor cards, and females, younger, and religiously affiliated persons as regards the general willingness to donate organs postmortem

Ueber die Meteoritenfälle von Pillistfer, Buschhof und Igast in Liv- und Kurland

http://tartu.ester.ee/record=b1637239~S1*es

Intravitreal treatment in patients with exudative age-related macular degeneration and visual acuity ≤ 0.05

Background: To investigate intravitreal treatment efficiencies in patients suffering from exudative ARMD with a BCVA ≤ 0.05. Methods: Retrospective analysis: Analysis parameters were lesion type, BCVA at baseline and at follow-up, the intravitreal drug used, and its application frequency. Patients were divided into: 1) following injections of bevacizumab, triamcinolone, their combination, or ranibizumab regardless of their lesion subtype, 2) or by lesion subtype. Statistical tests were performed using Wilcoxon signed-rank tests, Kruskal-Wallis tests and multivariable logistic regressions. Results: Seventy four eyes of 74 patients were analyzed. Follow-up was at 12.0 to 15.7 weeks. Median difference of BCVA (logMAR) between baseline and follow-up was 0.000 (−0.030, 0.175) in classic (p = 0.105), 0.000 (−1.15, 0.20) in occult (p = 0.005), −0.200 (−1.20, 0.60) in cases with subretinal fluid (p = 0.207), 0.000 (-0.60, 0.30) in pigment epithelial detachment (p = 0.813), and 0.050 (−0.40, 0.70) in Junius Kuhnt maculopathy (p = 0.344). BCVA increased ≥ 0.2 logMAR in 4 (24 %) classic, 9 (47 %) occult, 6 (33 %) pigment epithelial detachment, 6 (55 %) subretinal fluid, in 29 (39 %) eyes regardless of the lesion type, and reached a BCVA ≥ 0.05 in 7 (9 %) of those with a baseline BCVA <0.05. Conclusions: Results indicate that in patients with ARMD and a BCVA lower 0.05, intravitreal treatment may improve visual acuity, most probably in cases with occult lesions.<br

A User-centric Taxonomy for Conversational Generative Language Models

Conversational generative language models (GLMs) like ChatGPT are being rapidly adopted. Previous research on non-conversational GLMs showed that formulating prompts is critical for receiving good outputs. However, it is unclear how conversational GLMs are used when solving complex problems that require multi-step interactions. This paper addresses this research gap based on findings from a large participant event we conducted, where ChatGPT was iteratively and in a multi-step manner used while solving a complex problem. We derived a taxonomy of prompting behavior employed for solving complex problems as well as archetypes. While the taxonomy provides common knowledge on GLMs usage based on analyzed input-prompts, the different archetypes facilitate the classification of operators according to their usage. With both we provide exploratory knowledge and a foundation for design science research endeavors, which can be referred to, enabling further research and development of prompt engineering, prompting tactics, and prompting strategies on common ground

Human umbilical cord-derived mesenchymal stem cells utilise activin-A to suppress interferon-gamma production by natural killer cells

Following allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT), interferon (IFN)-γ levels in the recipient's body can strongly influence the clinical outcome. Human umbilical cord-derived mesenchymal stem cells (UC-MSCs) are lucrative as biological tolerance inducers in HSCT settings. Hence, we studied the molecular mechanism of how UC-MSCs influence natural killer (NK) cell-mediated IFN-γ production. Allogeneic NK cells were cultured in direct contact with UC-MSCs or cell free supernatants from MSC cultures (MSC conditioned media). We found that soluble factors secreted by UC-MSCs strongly suppressed IL-12/IL-18-induced IFN-γ production by NK cells by reducing phosphorylation of STAT4, NF-κB as well as T-bet activity. UC-MSCs secreted considerable amounts of Activin-A, which could suppress IFN-γ production by NK cells. Neutralisation of Activin-A in MSC conditioned media significantly abrogated their suppressive abilities. Till date, multiple groups have reported that prostaglandin (PG)-E2 produced by MSCs can suppress NK cell functions. Indeed, we found that inhibition of PGE2 production by MSCs could also significantly restore IFN-γ production. However, the effects of Activin-A and PGE2 were not cumulative. To the best of our knowledge, we are first to report the role of Activin-A in MSC mediated suppression of IFN-γ production by NK cells.DFG/SFB738/A5Hannover Biomedical Research School (HBRS)DFG/REBIRTHNiedersächsische Krebsgesellschaf

Scale decomposition in compressible turbulence

This work presents a rigorous framework based on coarse-graining to analyze highly compressible turbulence. We show how the requirement that viscous effects on the dynamics of large-scale momentum and kinetic energy be negligible ---an inviscid criterion--- naturally supports a density weighted coarse-graining of the velocity field. Such a coarse-graining method is already known in the literature as Favre filtering; however its use has been primarily motivated by appealing modeling properties rather than underlying physical considerations. We also prove that kinetic energy injection can be localized to the largest scales by proper stirring, and argue that stirring with an external acceleration field rather than a body force would yield a longer inertial range in simulations. We then discuss the special case of buoyancy-driven flows subject to a spatially-uniform gravitational field. We conclude that a range of scales can exist over which the mean kinetic energy budget is dominated by inertial processes and is immune from contributions due to molecular viscosity and external stirring.Comment: 31 pages, 1 figure, to appear in Physica

Interventional Pneumology in Pulmonary Bleeding; A Review: From the Bronchus to the Vessel

Interventional pneumology includes both bronchological and vascular methods of diagnosis and therapy, especially in emergency situations such as pulmonary hemorrhage. In massive pulmonary hemorrhage bronchological diagnosis is required to determine the site and extent of bleeding, as well as angiography of bronchial arteries, and of pulmonary arteries. Bronchus occlusion by aid of balloon catheter or double lumen tube are holding measures until definitive surgery or embolization of bronchial or pulmonary arteries can be performed. The paper suggests a close relationship between bronchoscopic and angiographic diagnosis and therapy in case of severe pulmonary bleeding

Transformer-Based Analysis of Sentiment Towards German Political Parties on Twitter During the 2021 Election Year

Twitter has become an important platform for political discussions among both politicians and the public and was extensively used during the 2021 federal election in Germany. Previous research examined the sentiment of the major political actors during that election on Twitter, but it remains unclear how the German public responded to them on Twitter in terms of sentiment. We analyzed a corpus of 713,742 tweets mentioning the Twitter handle of 89 of the most important party and politician accounts. We annotated a subset of 2,000 of these tweets regarding their sentiment and used this and other annotated corpora to implement and evaluate sentiment analysis algorithms based on singlelabel classification (positive, negative and neutral). We achieved best results with the German BERT model gbert-large using a combination of our annotated corpus and a previously annotated corpus from the same context as training material. This model achieves an average accuracy of 81.8% in a 5x5 cross-validation setting. Applying sentiment analysis on the overall corpus revealed that the majority of the tweets expressed negative sentiments. We investigated sentiment developments per party and show that sentiment was driven by significant events such as the implementation of stricter COVID19 regulations