Predicting Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical (ATC) Classification of Drugs by Integrating Chemical-Chemical Interactions and Similarities

The Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical (ATC) classification system, recommended by the World Health Organization, categories drugs into different classes according to their therapeutic and chemical characteristics. For a set of query compounds, how can we identify which ATC-class (or classes) they belong to? It is an important and challenging problem because the information thus obtained would be quite useful for drug development and utilization. By hybridizing the informations of chemical-chemical interactions and chemical-chemical similarities, a novel method was developed for such purpose. It was observed by the jackknife test on a benchmark dataset of 3,883 drug compounds that the overall success rate achieved by the prediction method was about 73% in identifying the drugs among the following 14 main ATC-classes: (1) alimentary tract and metabolism; (2) blood and blood forming organs; (3) cardiovascular system; (4) dermatologicals; (5) genitourinary system and sex hormones; (6) systemic hormonal preparations, excluding sex hormones and insulins; (7) anti-infectives for systemic use; (8) antineoplastic and immunomodulating agents; (9) musculoskeletal system; (10) nervous system; (11) antiparasitic products, insecticides and repellents; (12) respiratory system; (13) sensory organs; (14) various. Such a success rate is substantially higher than 7% by the random guess. It has not escaped our notice that the current method can be straightforwardly extended to identify the drugs for their 2nd-level, 3rd-level, 4th-level, and 5th-level ATC-classifications once the statistically significant benchmark data are available for these lower levels

In-Flight Transmission of SARS-CoV-2.

Four persons with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 infection had traveled on the same flight from Boston, Massachusetts, USA, to Hong Kong, China. Their virus genetic sequences are identical, unique, and belong to a clade not previously identified in Hong Kong, which strongly suggests that the virus can be transmitted during air travel

What makes health promotion research distinct?

There have been concerns about the decline of health promotion as a practice and discipline and alongside this, calls for a clearer articulation of health promotion research and what, if anything, makes it distinct. This discussion paper, based on a review of the literature; the authors’ own experiences in the field; and a workshop delivered by two of the authors at the 8th Nordic Health Promotion Conference, seeks to state the reasons why health promotion research is distinctive. While by no means exhaustive, the paper suggests four distinctive features. The paper hopes to be a catalyst to enable health promotion researchers to be explicit in their practice and to begin the process of developing an agreed set of research principles

A Repeated Measures Experiment of Green Exercise to Improve Self-Esteem in UK School Children

Exercising in natural, green environments creates greater improvements in adult's self-esteem than exercise undertaken in urban or indoor settings. No comparable data are available for children. The aim of this study was to determine whether so called 'green exercise' affected changes in self-esteem; enjoyment and perceived exertion in children differently to urban exercise. We assessed cardiorespiratory fitness (20 m shuttle-run) and self-reported physical activity (PAQ-A) in 11 and 12 year olds (n = 75). Each pupil completed two 1.5 mile timed runs, one in an urban and another in a rural environment. Trials were completed one week apart during scheduled physical education lessons allocated using a repeated measures design. Self-esteem was measured before and after each trial, ratings of perceived exertion (RPE) and enjoyment were assessed after completing each trial. We found a significant main effect (F (1,74), = 12.2, p<0.001), for the increase in self-esteem following exercise but there was no condition by exercise interaction (F (1,74), = 0.13, p = 0.72). There were no significant differences in perceived exertion or enjoyment between conditions. There was a negative correlation (r = -0.26, p = 0.04) between habitual physical activity and RPE during the control condition, which was not evident in the green exercise condition (r = -0.07, p = 0.55). Contrary to previous studies in adults, green exercise did not produce significantly greater increases in self-esteem than the urban exercise condition. Green exercise was enjoyed more equally by children with differing levels of habitual physical activity and has the potential to engage less active children in exercise. © 2013 Reed et al

Incidence and drug treatment of emotional distress after cancer diagnosis : a matched primary care case-control study

Notes This work is published under the standard license to publish agreement. After 12 months the work will become freely available and the license terms will switch to a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Worth the ‘EEfRT’? The Effort Expenditure for Rewards Task as an Objective Measure of Motivation and Anhedonia

Background: Of the putative psychopathological endophenotypes in major depressive disorder (MDD), the anhedonic subtype is particularly well supported. Anhedonia is generally assumed to reflect aberrant motivation and reward responsivity. However, research has been limited by a lack of objective measures of reward motivation. We present the Effort-Expenditure for Rewards Task (EEfRT or ‘‘effort’’), a novel behavioral paradigm as a means of exploring effort-based decision-making in humans. Using the EEfRT, we test the hypothesis that effort-based decision-making is related to trait anhedonia. Methods/Results: 61 undergraduate students participated in the experiment. Subjects completed self-report measures of mood and trait anhedonia, and completed the EEfRT. Across multiple analyses, we found a significant inverse relationship between anhedonia and willingness to expend effort for rewards. Conclusions: These findings suggest that anhedonia is specifically associated with decreased motivation for rewards, and provide initial validation for the EEfRT as a laboratory-based behavioral measure of reward motivation and effort-base

CHROMOSPHERICALLY ACTIVE STARS in the RAVE SURVEY. II. YOUNG DWARFS in the SOLAR NEIGHBORHOOD

© 2017. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved. A large sample of over 38,000 chromospherically active candidate solar-like stars and cooler dwarfs from the RAVE survey is addressed in this paper. An improved activity identification with respect to the previous study was introduced to build a catalog of field stars in the solar neighborhood with an excess emission flux in the calcium infrared triplet wavelength region. The central result of this work is the calibration of the age-activity relation for main-sequence dwarfs in a range from a few 10 Myr up to a few Gyr. It enabled an order of magnitude age estimation of the entire active sample. Almost 15,000 stars are shown to be younger than 1 Gyr and ∼2000 younger than 100 Myr. The young age of the most active stars is confirmed by their position off the main sequence in the J - K versus N UV - V diagram showing strong ultraviolet excess, mid-infrared excess in the J - K versus W 1 - W 2 diagram, and very cool temperatures (J - K < 0.7). They overlap with the reference pre-main-sequence RAVE stars often displaying X-ray emission. The activity level increasing with the color reveals their different nature from the solar-like stars and probably represents an underlying dynamo-generating magnetic fields in cool stars. Of the RAVE objects from DR5, 50% are found in the TGAS catalog and supplemented with accurate parallaxes and proper motions by Gaia. This makes the database of a large number of young stars in a combination with RAVE's radial velocities directly useful as a tracer of the very recent large-scale star formation history in the solar neighborhood. The data are available online in the Vizier database

Galactic kinematics from RAVE to Gaia-RVS Data

RAVE data has provided new results on Galactic kinematics like the kinematical decomposition of the Galactic disk. This decomposition permits to identify the different components of the disk and to characterize them in terms of scale height and scale length. With the data provided by Gaia and in particular the RVS, we will have a completly renewed view of the Galaxy. The precision of the RVS will permit to undertake a precise analysis of the kinematics of the Galactic disks. This knowledge will provide significant clues to constrain the scenarios of the Galactic disk formation

Two-electron spin correlations in precision placed donors in silicon

Substitutional donor atoms in silicon are promising qubits for quantum computation with extremely long relaxation and dephasing times demonstrated. One of the critical challenges of scaling these systems is determining inter-donor distances to achieve controllable wavefunction overlap while at the same time performing high fidelity spin readout on each qubit. Here we achieve such a device by means of scanning tunnelling microscopy lithography. We measure anti-correlated spin states between two donor-based spin qubits in silicon separated by 16 ± 1 nm. By utilising an asymmetric system with two phosphorus donors at one qubit site and one on the other (2P−1P), we demonstrate that the exchange interaction can be turned on and off via electrical control of two in-plane phosphorus doped detuning gates. We determine the tunnel coupling between the 2P−1P system to be 200 MHz and provide a roadmap for the observation of two-electron coherent exchange oscillations

The R-Process Alliance: Fourth Data Release from the Search for R-process-enhanced Stars in the Galactic Halo

This compilation is the fourth data release from the R-Process Alliance (RPA) search for r-process-enhanced stars and the second release based on "snapshot" high-resolution (R ~ 30,000) spectra collected with the du Pont 2.5 m Telescope. In this data release, we propose a new delineation between the r-I and r-II stellar classes at $[\mathrm{Eu}/\mathrm{Fe}]=+0.7$, instead of the empirically chosen $[\mathrm{Eu}/\mathrm{Fe}]=+1.0$ level previously in use, based on statistical tests of the complete set of RPA data released to date. We also statistically justify the minimum level of [Eu/Fe] for definition of the r-I stars, [Eu/Fe] > +0.3. Redefining the separation between r-I and r-II stars will aid in the analysis of the possible progenitors of these two classes of stars and determine whether these signatures arise from separate astrophysical sources at all. Applying this redefinition to previous RPA data, the number of identified r-II and r-I stars changes to 51 and 121, respectively, from the initial set of data releases published thus far. In this data release, we identify 21 new r-II, 111 new r-I (plus 3 re-identified), and 7 new (plus 1 re-identified) limited-r stars out of a total of 232 target stars, resulting in a total sample of 72 new r-II stars, 232 new r-I stars, and 42 new limited-r stars identified by the RPA to date