Atrial fibrillation in women versus men: etiology, pathophysiology, treatment, and prognosis

Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most common arrhythmia, and it predominantly occurs older individuals. Its prevalence is expected to rise as the general population ages. Men have a higher incidence of the disease, but since women have longer lifespans, the absolute numbers of patients with AF are similar across genders. There have been observed differences in the manifestation and outcomes of AF between men and women. Atrial fibrillation has been shown to be partially heritable and might be inherited differently by males and females. The distribution of risk factors has been shown to vary by sex: women tend to present at an older age with comorbid diabetes mellitus, hypertension, and valvular heart disease, while men tend to present with comorbid coronary heart disease. Women with atrial fibrillation have reported worse quality of life, longer duration of symptoms, and atypical symptoms not reported by men. The variations in clinical presentation may be explained by baseline cardiac structural and electrical differences. Men tend to have larger heart sizes, including left atria size and left ventricular wall thickness, which increases the risk of AF. Women tend to have more severe atrial fibrosis, which also increases the risk of AF. Cardiac electrophysiological differences may be impacted by sex hormones. Estrogen and testosterone enact opposite effects on cardiac ion concentrations and action potentials, and thus may affect arrhythmogenesis in men and women. The use of hormone replacement due to menopause has been steadily increasing; atrial fibrillation and hormone replacement overlap in a large number of female patients, but little research has been done into the interaction between the change in hormones and atrial fibrillation. The safety and efficacy of the major treatment options for atrial fibrillation have been compared and studied in men, but women have been underrepresented in these trials. Rhythm and rate control have been shown to yield similar morbidity and mortality in men, but rhythm control has led to worse prognosis in women. While rate control overall may be a better strategy for women, different rate control medications have different safety profiles. Digoxin, a rate control drug, increases the risk of breast cancer, but is the treatment most prescribed to women. Women are more likely to be on pharmacotherapy and are less likely to be referred for electrical cardioversion and ablation, even though studies have found that ablation lowers rates of cardiac and all-cause mortality. Women are also less likely than men to be given anticoagulant therapy to mitigate the risk of stroke, despite female sex being an independent risk factor for AF-associated stroke. The differences in treatment likely explain the observed differences in clinical outcomes between the sexes. Atrial fibrillation in women is associated with higher risks of stroke, cardiac events, cardiovascular mortality, and all-cause mortality. Furthering our understanding of atrial fibrillation is vital for improving outcomes in female patients

ACCESSORY BREAST TISSUE IN THE AXILLA IN A PUERPERAL WOMAN- CASE STUDY

Ectopic or accessory breast tissue (EBT) is an uncommon residual tissue that persists from normal embryonic development, found in 2-6% of the female population. EBT may occur anywhere along the embryonic mammary streak, but is most commonly located in the axillary region. EBT can consist of any or all components of the breast and may be functional or non-functional. The development of this tissue is hormone- dependent, similar to normal breast tissue. EBT presents as asymptomatic mass and may prove to be a diagnostic challenge in the absence of areola and nipple. The identification and distinction of EBT from other breast pathologies occurring in the area, both benign and malignant, is essential for proper management. In most of the cases, these lesions are asymptomatic and do not warrant any intervention unless they produce discomfort. In this report, we present a case of an ectopic breast tissue in the left axilla of an 24-year-old Asian Indian primipara patient. The importance of FNAC as diagnostic tool in suspected cases of polymastia without nipple/areola and the conservative approach through regular follow-up for management of proven benign ectopic breast tissue are highlighted

Computing fuzzy rough approximations in large scale information systems

Rough set theory is a popular and powerful machine learning tool. It is especially suitable for dealing with information systems that exhibit inconsistencies, i.e. objects that have the same values for the conditional attributes but a different value for the decision attribute. In line with the emerging granular computing paradigm, rough set theory groups objects together based on the indiscernibility of their attribute values. Fuzzy rough set theory extends rough set theory to data with continuous attributes, and detects degrees of inconsistency in the data. Key to this is turning the indiscernibility relation into a gradual relation, acknowledging that objects can be similar to a certain extent. In very large datasets with millions of objects, computing the gradual indiscernibility relation (or in other words, the soft granules) is very demanding, both in terms of runtime and in terms of memory. It is however required for the computation of the lower and upper approximations of concepts in the fuzzy rough set analysis pipeline. Current non-distributed implementations in R are limited by memory capacity. For example, we found that a state of the art non-distributed implementation in R could not handle 30,000 rows and 10 attributes on a node with 62GB of memory. This is clearly insufficient to scale fuzzy rough set analysis to massive datasets. In this paper we present a parallel and distributed solution based on Message Passing Interface (MPI) to compute fuzzy rough approximations in very large information systems. Our results show that our parallel approach scales with problem size to information systems with millions of objects. To the best of our knowledge, no other parallel and distributed solutions have been proposed so far in the literature for this problem

METHOD FOR SECURELY MERGING UNIFORM LISTS

Present disclosure the present disclosure is directed to secure computation and data encryption. In particular, the present disclosure is directed to secure computation that enables computation while keeping data encrypted. More particularly, the present disclosure is directed to a secure protocol that can merge two encrypted lists given that they are ordered. In a modern data analysis process, data is transferred to, stored in, and computed by a server. During these three processes, encryption protects the data when it is transferred and stored

1-(3,5-Dimethyl­phen­yl)-4,5-dimethyl-2-phenyl-1H-imidazole hemihydrate

In the title compound, C19H20N2·0.5H2O, the imidazole ring is essentially planar [maximum deviation = 0.005 (1) Å]. The imidazole ring makes dihedral angles of 67.46 (10) and 23.10 (11)° with the attached benzene and phenyl rings, respectively. The dihedral angle between the benzene and phenyl rings is 68.22 (10)°. Inter­molecular O—H⋯N and C—H⋯N hydrogen bonds are found in the crystal structure

4,5-Dimethyl-2-phenyl-1-(p-tol­yl)-1H-imidazole

In the title compound, C18H18N2, the imidazole ring is essentially planar [maximum deviation = 0.004 (1) Å] and makes dihedral angles of 68.91 (8) and 20.43 (9)° with the tolyl and phenyl rings, respectively. The dihedral angle between the latter rings is 73.62 (8)°. The crystal packing is stabilized by inter­molecular C—H⋯N hydrogen bonds

Antibacterial activity of Calathea anulque

No abstrac

Distributional Secure Merge

Secure merge refers to the problem of merging two sorted lists. The problem appears in different settings where each list is held by one of two parties, or the lists are themselves shared among two or more parties. The output of a secure merge protocol is secret shared. Each variant of the problem offers many useful applications. The difficulty in designing secure merge protocols vis-a-vis insecure merge protocols (which work in linear time with a single pass over the lists) has to do with operations having to be oblivious or data-independent. In particular, the protocol cannot leak the positions of items of each list in the final merged list. On account of this, sorting-based secure merge protocols have been a common solution to the problem. However, as they introduce (poly)logarithmic overheads, there has been active investigation into the task of building (near) linear time secure merge protocols. Most recently, Hemenway et al. put forth a protocol for secure merge that does achieve linear communication and computation and a round complexity of $O({\log\log n})$, where $n$ is the length of the lists being merged. While this shows the feasibility of a linear time secure merge, it still leaves room for the design of a concretely efficient linear time secure merge. In this work, we consider a relaxation of the problem where the lists are uniformly random. We show a secure merge protocol for uniformly random lists that achieves $O({n\log\log n})$, i.e., near linear communication and computation and a round complexity of $O({\log\log n})$, where $n$ is the length of the lists being merged. Our protocol design is general and can be instantiated in a variety of settings so long as the building blocks (basic ones such as comparisons and shuffles) can be realized in said settings. Although we do not achieve the same asymptotic guarantees as Hemenway et al., our work is concretely efficient. We implement our protocol and compare it to the state of the art sorting protocols and demonstrate an order of magnitude improvement in running times and communication for lists of size of $2^{20}$. We also extend our protocol to work for lists sampled from arbitrary distributions. In particular, when the lists are (close to) identically distributed, we achieve the same efficiency as uniform lists. This immediately improve the performance of many crucial applications including PSI & Secure Join, thus illustrating the significance and applicability of our protocol in practice

Steric hindrance in the upper 50 kDa domain of the motor Myo2p leads to cytokinesis defects in fission yeast

Cytokinesis in many eukaryotes requires a contractile actomyosin ring that is placed at the division site. In fission yeast, which is an attractive organism for the study of cytokinesis, actomyosin ring assembly and contraction requires the myosin II heavy chain Myo2p. Although myo2-E1, a temperature-sensitive mutant defective in the upper 50 kDa domain of Myo2p, has been studied extensively, the molecular basis of the cytokinesis defect is not understood. Here, we isolate myo2-E1-Sup2, an intragenic suppressor that contains the original mutation in myo2-E1 (G345R) and a second mutation in the upper 50 kDa domain (Y297C). Unlike myo2-E1-Sup1, a previously characterized myo2-E1 suppressor, myo2-E1-Sup2 reverses actomyosin ring contraction defects in vitro and in vivo. Structural analysis of available myosin motor domain conformations suggests that a steric clash in myo2-E1, which is caused by the replacement of a glycine with a bulky arginine, is relieved in myo2-E1-Sup2 by mutation of a tyrosine to a smaller cysteine. Our work provides insight into the function of the upper 50 kDa domain of Myo2p, informs a molecular basis for the cytokinesis defect in myo2-E1, and may be relevant to the understanding of certain cardiomyopathies

Fecal Lipocalin 2, a Sensitive and Broadly Dynamic Non- Invasive Biomarker for Intestinal Inflammation

Inflammation has classically been defined histopathologically, especially by the presence of immune cell infiltrates. However, more recent studies suggest a role for low-grade inflammation in a variety of disorders ranging from metabolic syndrome to cancer, which is defined by modest elevations in pro-inflammatory gene expression. Consequently, there is a need for cost-effective, non-invasive biomarkers that, ideally, would have the sensitivity to detect low-grade inflammation and have a dynamic range broad enough to reflect classic robust intestinal inflammation. Herein, we report that, for assessment of intestinal inflammation, fecal lipocalin 2 (Lcn-2), measured by ELISA, serves this purpose. Specifically, using a well-characterized mouse model of DSS colitis, we observed that fecal Lcn-2 and intestinal expression of pro-inflammatory cytokines (IL-1b, CXCL1, TNFa) are modestly but significantly induced by very low concentrations of DSS (0.25 and 0.5%), and become markedly elevated at higher concentrations of DSS (1.0 and 4.0%). As expected, careful histopathologic analysis noted only modest immune infiltrates at low DSS concentration and robust colitis at higher DSS concentrations. In accordance, increased levels of the neutrophil product myeloperoxidase (MPO) was only detected in mice given 1.0 and 4.0% DSS. In addition, fecal Lcn-2 marks the severity of spontaneous colitis development in IL-10 deficient mice. Unlike histopathology, MPO, and q-RT-PCR, the assay of fecal Lcn-2 requires only a stool sample, permits measurement over time, and can detect inflammation as early as 1 day following DSS administration. Thus, assay of fecal Lcn-2 by ELISA can function as a non-invasive, sensitive, dynamic, stable and cost-effective means to monitor intestinal inflammation in mice