Gestational age assessment of neonates using foot and hand length measurements: a cross sectional tertiary care centre study

Background: Gestational age of neonates computed based on Naegele’s formula, ultrasound, or using modified New Ballard score (NBS) is limited in the community setup due to illiteracy, accessibility and expertise. Hence there should be alternative technique which can be done even by inexperienced health care staff and in rural communities. Objective of current study was to find out the correlation of foot and hand length with gestational age among neonates.Methods: A cross sectional study including 200 neonates and their foot length, hand length, birth weight was recorded. Gestational age assessment was done using modified NBS. Correlation among various study parameters was done using Pearson’s correlation coefficient.Results: Of the 200 neonates studied, the mean foot length was 7.1±0.46 cm with a range of 4-8.5 cm. The mean hand length was 6.0±0.71 cm with a range of 3.8-7.4 cm. The mean foot and hand length of term neonates was higher than preterm neonates. The mean foot and hand length of normal weight neonates was higher than Low birth weight neonates.Conclusions: Foot and hand length is a simple, quick and reliable measurement which can be used as a proxy measurement to gestational age assessment. It can be easily measured by traditional birth attendants in the community

Congenital corneal clouding: A case series

Congenital corneal clouding often causes diagnostic dilemma; hence, detailed evaluation and timely intervention are required to decrease the morbidity. Various genetic, developmental, metabolic, and idiopathic causes of congenital corneal clouding include Peters anomaly, sclerocornea, birth trauma, congenital glaucoma, mucopolysaccharidosis, and dermoids. We report a case series of four neonates with congenital corneal clouding admitted in our neonatal intensive care unit, over 5 years. Two cases were of Peters anomaly, one each of primary congenital glaucoma and glaucoma secondary to congenital rubella

Effective Long-Context Scaling of Foundation Models

We present a series of long-context LLMs that support effective context windows of up to 32,768 tokens. Our model series are built through continual pretraining from Llama 2 with longer training sequences and on a dataset where long texts are upsampled. We perform extensive evaluation on language modeling, synthetic context probing tasks, and a wide range of research benchmarks. On research benchmarks, our models achieve consistent improvements on most regular tasks and significant improvements on long-context tasks over Llama 2. Notably, with a cost-effective instruction tuning procedure that does not require human-annotated long instruction data, the 70B variant can already surpass gpt-3.5-turbo-16k's overall performance on a suite of long-context tasks. Alongside these results, we provide an in-depth analysis on the individual components of our method. We delve into Llama's position encodings and discuss its limitation in modeling long dependencies. We also examine the impact of various design choices in the pretraining process, including the data mix and the training curriculum of sequence lengths -- our ablation experiments suggest that having abundant long texts in the pretrain dataset is not the key to achieving strong performance, and we empirically verify that long context continual pretraining is more efficient and similarly effective compared to pretraining from scratch with long sequences

Early development of infants with neurofibromatosis type 1: a case series

Background Prospective studies of infants at familial risk for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have yielded insights into the earliest signs of the disorder but represent heterogeneous samples of unclear aetiology. Complementing this approach by studying cohorts of infants with monogenic syndromes associated with high rates of ASD offers the opportunity to elucidate the factors that lead to ASD. Methods We present the first report from a prospective study of ten 10-month-old infants with neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1), a monogenic disorder with high prevalence of ASD or ASD symptomatology. We compared data from infants with NF1 to a large cohort of infants at familial risk for ASD, separated by outcome at age 3 of ASD (n = 34), atypical development (n = 44), or typical development (n = 89), and low-risk controls (n = 75). Domains assessed at 10 months by parent report and examiner observation include cognitive and adaptive function, sensory processing, social engagement, and temperament. Results Infants with NF1 showed striking impairments in motor functioning relative to low-risk infants; this pattern was seen in infants with later ASD from the familial cohort (HR-ASD). Both infants with NF1 and the HR-ASD group showed communication delays relative to low-risk infants. Conclusions Ten-month-old infants with NF1 show a range of developmental difficulties that were particularly striking in motor and communication domains. As with HR-ASD infants, social skills at this age were not notably impaired. This is some of the first information on early neurodevelopment in NF1. Strong inferences are limited by the sample size, but the findings suggest implications for early comparative developmental science and highlight motor functioning as an important domain to inform the development of relevant animal models. The findings have clinical implications in indicating an important focus for early surveillance and remediation in this early diagnosed genetic disorder

Acute kidney injury in patients treated with immune checkpoint inhibitors

Background: Immune checkpoint inhibitor-associated acute kidney injury (ICPi-AKI) has emerged as an important toxicity among patients with cancer. Methods: We collected data on 429 patients with ICPi-AKI and 429 control patients who received ICPis contemporaneously but who did not develop ICPi-AKI from 30 sites in 10 countries. Multivariable logistic regression was used to identify predictors of ICPi-AKI and its recovery. A multivariable Cox model was used to estimate the effect of ICPi rechallenge versus no rechallenge on survival following ICPi-AKI. Results: ICPi-AKI occurred at a median of 16 weeks (IQR 8-32) following ICPi initiation. Lower baseline estimated glomerular filtration rate, proton pump inhibitor (PPI) use, and extrarenal immune-related adverse events (irAEs) were each associated with a higher risk of ICPi-AKI. Acute tubulointerstitial nephritis was the most common lesion on kidney biopsy (125/151 biopsied patients [82.7%]). Renal recovery occurred in 276 patients (64.3%) at a median of 7 weeks (IQR 3-10) following ICPi-AKI. Treatment with corticosteroids within 14 days following ICPi-AKI diagnosis was associated with higher odds of renal recovery (adjusted OR 2.64; 95% CI 1.58 to 4.41). Among patients treated with corticosteroids, early initiation of corticosteroids (within 3 days of ICPi-AKI) was associated with a higher odds of renal recovery compared with later initiation (more than 3 days following ICPi-AKI) (adjusted OR 2.09; 95% CI 1.16 to 3.79). Of 121 patients rechallenged, 20 (16.5%) developed recurrent ICPi-AKI. There was no difference in survival among patients rechallenged versus those not rechallenged following ICPi-AKI. Conclusions: Patients who developed ICPi-AKI were more likely to have impaired renal function at baseline, use a PPI, and have extrarenal irAEs. Two-thirds of patients had renal recovery following ICPi-AKI. Treatment with corticosteroids was associated with improved renal recovery

Early differences in auditory processing relate to Autism Spectrum Disorder traits in infants with Neurofibromatosis Type I

Abstract: Background: Sensory modulation difficulties are common in children with conditions such as Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and could contribute to other social and non-social symptoms. Positing a causal role for sensory processing differences requires observing atypical sensory reactivity prior to the emergence of other symptoms, which can be achieved through prospective studies. Methods: In this longitudinal study, we examined auditory repetition suppression and change detection at 5 and 10 months in infants with and without Neurofibromatosis Type 1 (NF1), a condition associated with higher likelihood of developing ASD. Results: In typically developing infants, suppression to vowel repetition and enhanced responses to vowel/pitch change decreased with age over posterior regions, becoming more frontally specific; age-related change was diminished in the NF1 group. Whilst both groups detected changes in vowel and pitch, the NF1 group were largely slower to show a differentiated neural response. Auditory responses did not relate to later language, but were related to later ASD traits. Conclusions: These findings represent the first demonstration of atypical brain responses to sounds in infants with NF1 and suggest they may relate to the likelihood of later ASD

Differential cross section measurements for the production of a W boson in association with jets in proton–proton collisions at √s = 7 TeV

Measurements are reported of differential cross sections for the production of a W boson, which decays into a muon and a neutrino, in association with jets, as a function of several variables, including the transverse momenta (pT) and pseudorapidities of the four leading jets, the scalar sum of jet transverse momenta (HT), and the difference in azimuthal angle between the directions of each jet and the muon. The data sample of pp collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 7 TeV was collected with the CMS detector at the LHC and corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 5.0 fb[superscript −1]. The measured cross sections are compared to predictions from Monte Carlo generators, MadGraph + pythia and sherpa, and to next-to-leading-order calculations from BlackHat + sherpa. The differential cross sections are found to be in agreement with the predictions, apart from the pT distributions of the leading jets at high pT values, the distributions of the HT at high-HT and low jet multiplicity, and the distribution of the difference in azimuthal angle between the leading jet and the muon at low values.United States. Dept. of EnergyNational Science Foundation (U.S.)Alfred P. Sloan Foundatio

Penilaian Kinerja Keuangan Koperasi di Kabupaten Pelalawan

This paper describe development and financial performance of cooperative in District Pelalawan among 2007 - 2008. Studies on primary and secondary cooperative in 12 sub-districts. Method in this stady use performance measuring of productivity, efficiency, growth, liquidity, and solvability of cooperative. Productivity of cooperative in Pelalawan was highly but efficiency still low. Profit and income were highly, even liquidity of cooperative very high, and solvability was good

Juxtaposing BTE and ATE – on the role of the European insurance industry in funding civil litigation

One of the ways in which legal services are financed, and indeed shaped, is through private insurance arrangement. Two contrasting types of legal expenses insurance contracts (LEI) seem to dominate in Europe: before the event (BTE) and after the event (ATE) legal expenses insurance. Notwithstanding institutional differences between different legal systems, BTE and ATE insurance arrangements may be instrumental if government policy is geared towards strengthening a market-oriented system of financing access to justice for individuals and business. At the same time, emphasizing the role of a private industry as a keeper of the gates to justice raises issues of accountability and transparency, not readily reconcilable with demands of competition. Moreover, multiple actors (clients, lawyers, courts, insurers) are involved, causing behavioural dynamics which are not easily predicted or influenced. Against this background, this paper looks into BTE and ATE arrangements by analysing the particularities of BTE and ATE arrangements currently available in some European jurisdictions and by painting a picture of their respective markets and legal contexts. This allows for some reflection on the performance of BTE and ATE providers as both financiers and keepers. Two issues emerge from the analysis that are worthy of some further reflection. Firstly, there is the problematic long-term sustainability of some ATE products. Secondly, the challenges faced by policymakers that would like to nudge consumers into voluntarily taking out BTE LEI

Search for stop and higgsino production using diphoton Higgs boson decays

Results are presented of a search for a "natural" supersymmetry scenario with gauge mediated symmetry breaking. It is assumed that only the supersymmetric partners of the top-quark (stop) and the Higgs boson (higgsino) are accessible. Events are examined in which there are two photons forming a Higgs boson candidate, and at least two b-quark jets. In 19.7 inverse femtobarns of proton-proton collision data at sqrt(s) = 8 TeV, recorded in the CMS experiment, no evidence of a signal is found and lower limits at the 95% confidence level are set, excluding the stop mass below 360 to 410 GeV, depending on the higgsino mass